Week 6 Reading Week
During reading week, I managed to delve into my first official journal by Karen Barad entitled Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. In the text she advocates her theory of Agential Realism as an alternative to traditional western forms of “representationalism” within the sciences. How language can only take us so far before we should shift focus to posthumanist performativity and “nonhuman agency.”
Offering space for “diffraction rather than reflection”, Barad expresses “Cartesian doubt” over the Heisenberg uncertainty principle before suggesting that quantum psychics is based more on matters of “indeterminacy” over uncertainty. Barad believes that metaphysical notions of “agential separability” and “intra-actions” could offer a critical resolution to long-standing issues within quantum mechanics such as the measurement problem of wave-functions.
These are all fascinating ideas but admittedly some of them go over my head, so I was intrigued to find practicing artists influenced by the quantum world’s weirdness. Upon Helen’s recommendation, I uncovered the work of Jane Grant an artist/researcher whose work explores the boundaries between scientific investigation and artistic exploration. I found her site-specific artwork “This Excited Surface” to be particularly inspiring as it draws upon Karen Barad’s writing.
The sound-based work consists of a glowing yellow dish (representing Earth’s ionosphere) concealing floor speakers playing back a sonification of the sun’s activity. This interplanetary interplay interweaves cosmological ideas with a profoundly human desire for connection. Figuring human ontology through scientific phenomena is exactly what I want to achieve with this research report. Grant’s work is an excellent example of this and reminds me of Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life which similarly explores the philosophy of human relationships against solar backdrops. To quote Karen Barad in the Posthumanist Performativity journal “We are part of the world in its differential becoming.”
References • Barad, K., 2003. Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), pp.801–831. • https://continentaldrift.blog/2016/03/31/summary-notes-karan-barad-posthuman-performativity/ • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem • http://www.janegrant.org/this-excited-surface • Malick, T. et al., 2011. The tree of life, Fox Searchlight Pictures / River Road Entertainment present.
Image of This Excited Surface by: Jane Grant http://www.janegrant.org/this-excited-surface
Image from The Tree of Life (2011) by: Terrence Malick http://www.foxsearchlight.com/thetreeoflife/