units in construction
jeffrey jenkins
research
cole caswell
research
chris archer (prototype)
Micromobilia:
Machines for the Intensive Research of Interior Bio-Geographies (spurse with Chris Archer, Cole Caswell and Jeffrey Jenkins)
Micromobilia is a mobile laboratory that unfolds out of three shipping crates. This laboratory is designed to be utilized within institutional settings to further research the intra-weavings of the biological, the social, and the geographical. We are interested in supporting independant and autonomous research over time to sample, investigate, and catalyze the microbiological geography of institutional interiors. This research works on diagrammatic principles of (geo)graphy : (1) drawing out of the world: understood from an unfolding multiple perspectives towards reconceptualizing the earth moving inside of the Institutional; and (2) drawing in and between: an engagement with intensive states of being is where difference becomes an emergent force.
These units, and embeded practices work to problematize and develop a series of ongoing research areas: (1) Outside: Micromobilia consists of research unit(s) and practices geared to investigate and experiment with the microbiological strata of the institution’s production of interiority, which is part of an unfolding geographic continuum without transcendent exteriority; (2) Individualization: What passes as individual things are always collectives- heterogeneous assemblages -- composed of human and non-human agents and systems. Micromobilia endeavors to draw forth agents towards new individuations of institutional collective becomings. (3) Critique: Critique modulates into immanent geographic zones: Micromobilia establishes a joint platform for consultation, by which experimentation with interior geographies across a spectrum of institutions is made possible for us and others. (4) Entanglement: Micromobilia allows for the facilitation of research that spurse and others can initiate. We would like to speculate across this project that the institution and the research unit are always linked by what is produced between them -- an experiment with co-evolvement for the production of intensive geographies of difference -- as yet unkown but emergent.
We just finished this project. It is part of the Experimental Geography show curated by Nato Thompson. It will be travelling over the next two years. see here for details (link). More coming soon.
We collaborated with three exceptional artists to make part of this project. See images to the far right. More on their work:
Chris Archer
Jeffrey Jenkins
(Below is a text for the catalogue):
Participatory Research: Geography: Experimental
Iain Kerr
Today, all actions -- from drinking a simple glass of water to reading this text -- are explicitly global in their spheres of intra-activity. These activities ripple across the world crossing from micro to macro systems, from the social folded across natural systems to the spaces of the technosciences making both new cultures and new natures. How do we come to terms with this complex reality? This question is what begins participatory research practices within forms of experimental geography. We begin to answer this question by simply asking: what is happening? Already this get messy: we who ask are not separate from what we ask about. We are within and part of what we study. Participatory research thus begins with the assumption that all forms of meaning, doing, making, thinking, and knowing are participatory entanglements with both discursive and material systems. There is a distributed geography of participation, for example, you who reads this, you have within and across you vast entanglements: by cell count you are 90% Bacteria, Fungi, and Protocistae which is shaped by a deep history of stellar gases, the earth cooling, the development of clothing, animal human kinships, class and gender politics, air travel, transversal gene swapping and mutation of all kinds etc. And still this acknowledgment of a geography barely begins the project of tracing our entangled becomings (participation). Simply put, it is a vast web that participates to make us and participates in our actions. This geography of participation is a fully post-human event (the world is composed of both human and non-humans and agency is an emergent relational phenomena that happens of many differing levels of reality).
If participation is a given then the status of subjects can not be assumed in advance of a particular event. The production/formation of subjects or agents is because of a boundary producing event of a particular set of relations (which it is part of). This is the next meaning of our geography: the tracing of systems, practices, and iterative structures that all allow for the situated separation/becoming of subjects/agents through an evolving set of relations. The question is no longer one of showing that nature and culture are interwoven or constructed but how they become what they are. This is what calls for experimentation. If participatory research involves the production of new systems giving rise to new forms of subjects then to act/research is to be involved in change -- experimental change. We need to recognize that acts of knowing are forms of change.
Perhaps this offers us a new way to understand these emergent geographies within the arts? If we are part of a co-emergent web of entanglements that intra-actively co-produce the real, then “re-presentation” is simply not possible (it requires a fundamental separation between the seer and the seen). If representation and other such mirror strategies are flawed, so are their critiques that remain within representational structures (this is the limitation of practices such as institutional critique). There is a need for post-human and post representational experimental practices that flow across of geographies of becoming. An art of participatory experimental engagements that emerge from the now inseparably intra-woven geographies of being (ontology), knowing (epistemology), and doing (ethics).