spurse is an open-ended group of individuals and organizations that work together as a type of experimental consultation service towards the development of new forms of engagement, practices and knowledges.  

 

We believe that there is a necessity today of working collectively to rethink all of the givens of our modes of being in the world so to develop new forms of practices and knowledges. We are creatures who are not alone -- and we, as creatures, are a type of collective -- a complex entanglement of many other creatures (bacteria, fungi, protocistae etc.), systems, habits, matters of concern and forces at varying scales. This world, is a world that we are not simply “in” but we are, rather, an intra-actively co-emerging part of this dynamic world. It is a world of irreducible messiness, complexity and open-ended multiplicity.

 

The great achievements of abstraction in science, philosophy, and everyday language  that has come about with the development of the categories of “nature” and “culture”, “mind” and “body” have left us with a false simplicity about what is the human realm -- and what it means to be part of the world. More than this, these dualities, which allow us to imagine that we live in a world of representations separate from a reality outside of “our ideas” has left us as producers of practices in the unfortunate place of becoming only critics -- and critics of representations at that! Today it is neither adequate -- nor even possible to stop at critiques of representation or the simple and simplistic revealing of “social constructions”. What needs to be done? What are matters of concern? These are collective questions involving the seemingly paradoxical production of an ethics and aesthetics of producing collectivities. Who, as both humans and non-humans, is part of these emerging collectives? How do we create -- recognizing our messy entangled state of becoming within the world? What are these bodies -- these institutions -- these collectives capable of?

 

We are interested in the development of new critical practices and experimental forms of wonder which complicates our judgments and defeats our easy essentializing habits. These are experiments that cannot be not separated or objectivized from the practices from which they emerge. Knowledge is always part of a practice and a specific matter of concern.  We are curious and thus we work to experimentally allow for divergent things and matters of concerns to emerge or inflect our own becomings.

 

When we speak of a “commons” or “common matters of concern” or “common knowledge” we do not imagine this on a model of agreement or recognition but rather as the mutually connected nature of assemblages as events. The relation of the wasp to the orchid is a good example of this. “Their connection is an event that matters in diverging ways for the wasp and for the orchid. Its achievement is not to lead the wasp and the orchid to accept a common aim of definition, but having the wasp and orchid presuppose the existence of each other in order to produce themselves” (Isabelle Stengers).

 

It is from this perspective that we come up with forms of interdisciplinary research methods and practices. Much of our work involves the setting up of various types of methodologies to first consult/probe/problematize the given and then collectively develop, with communities (both human and nonhuman), new practices and systems of engagement which can allow for new forms of knowledge production and systems of engagement. These endeavors often take on the form of a temporary research institute/laboratory or consultation service. What this might mean in actuality can vary quite broadly. We have opened restaurants, installed archives in government buildings, built microbiological laboratories for museums, developed housing and clothing systems for migration, conducted urban research with collaborators on a global level, collaborated with dance companies, prepared musical performances, worked with communities to record oral histories, hosted symposia on various topics, organized community soccer games, and published books and DVDs etc. We have been working this way for the last ten years in various locations and situations internationally. In our collaborations each of us brings many differing sets of skills -- some of us are computer scientists, urbanists, geographers, philosophers, artists, architects, designers, microbiologists, skateboarders etc. We see our skills not as forms of elite expertise but as composing an open tool kit that allows us, as engaged participants in the unfolding of the world, to act towards the development of new modes of doing, acting, thinking, and building with others.