Abstract

Full Paper. Session: Humans and NonHumans / Complexity Research and Practice

Keywords: practice-based research, new materialism, diffraction, digital installation art

This text details a practice-based research project which was partially materialised within the art-installation Splitting Defense. Splitting defense is a mixed media artwork, comprising an audio narrative embedded within a physical installation. It places the recipient into the realm of a future society, remembering the horrors of the present. While evoking a languorous sense of belonging to the future, it casts an eerie light on current practices of feeling, empathising, caring, ignoring, and dividing. The artwork thus playfully engages topics such as gendered patterns of valuing and devaluing phenomena of emotional labour.

• Michael Heidt (DE) likes to situate his practice at the intersection of poietic code creation and critical-reflective theory production. He has conducted practice-based research endeavours informed by fields such as philosophy, media art, and electronic writing. Project foci range from software-based inquiry into microbiological populations to speculative inquiry into the potentials of distributed ledger technologies to foster post-scarcity economies. An ongoing focus of Michael’s research is complexity, which he has applied as intellectual lens motivating research engagements with biological systems, interaction systems, and distributed systems. Michael was a visiting scholar at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology, is an alumnus of German Academic Scholarship Foundation, of DFG’s research training group crossWorlds, and of Andrea von Braun Foundation. Currently, he is conducting the project CoGS at Anhalt University while being an affiliated researcher at University of Kassel’s Gender/Diversity in Informatics Systems group.
• Elli Kuruş is a Leipzig-based (DE) collective artist, 44% complete [source: https://ellikurush.com]