Panel Statement

Panel: Diagrams, Formulae and Models: Aesthetic and Scientific Strategies of Visualisation

Arthur Koestler’s 1964 book, The Act of Creation, puts forward a transversal, diagrammatic notion of creative activity. He referred to this diagram as a ‘bisociation’: an event in which “two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference” coincide.  Such an event, as he described it, “is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wavelengths, as it were.” The outcome of this coincidence of independent matrices is either a collision, producing laughter, fusion, producing synthesis, or confrontation, producing aesthetic experience. This presentation traces the many ways that Koestler’s diagram can be found embodied within a series of critical events inside the developmental process and aspirations of the Transmute Collective’s award winning multi-user interactive work, Intimate Transactions. Specifically, I will discuss this through my own collaborative involvement in this project developing the haptic feedback system. It will be argued that the multiple instantiations of this diagram resonate to produce a diagrammatic ‘life’ –  signaling a way of thinking about the individuation of Intimate Transactions as a creature. More generally, Koestler’s diagram and this collaboration are discussed as a way to propose an idea of a transversal, distributed form of life that this has particular value in relation to ethical dimensions within creative practice research.

• Pia Ednie-Brown, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University, Australia. Pia Ednie-Brown is a designer, theorist and educator with creative research practice Onomatopoeia. She is an Associate Professor and Coordinator of Postgraduate Research in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University. Her research explores the implications of new technologies for design, relations between composition, diagramming and affect, ethics and aesthetics. From 2009 to 2011 she led an ARC project (with Prof. Mark Burry, Oron Catts, and Dr Andrew Burrow) seeking to re-theorise innovation for contemporary design practices in terms of coupled ethical and aesthetic concerns therein. A chief outcome of this project was the issue of Architectural Design (AD): The Innovation Imperative: Architectures of Vitality (2013).