Panel Statement

Panel: Media Art, Mediation and Contemporary Art

Key words: emergent practices, Pickering, social sciences, ‘mangle’ captures, creative practices

The emergence of new, social and creative media practices has added to a disciplinary mash up, drawing participants from, amongst others, computer science, engineering, visual arts, science studies, literature, philosophy, film and media studies. The question of emergent practices is taken up in the work of Andrew Pickering. In The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (1995), he writes about temporally emergent forms in experimental science laboratories. He makes a strong case for a re-conceptualization of research practice as a ‘mangle,’ an open-ended, evolutionary, and performative interplay of human and non-human agency. While Pickering’s ideas originated in science and technology studies, the concept of ‘mangle’ captures what he describes as an entanglement between the human and the material.

• Janis Jefferies, Professor in Visual Arts, Goldsmiths Digital Studios, Computing, University of London, UK.

Full text (PDF) p. 156-158