Art and Science Intra-action of Collecting Water from Fog: Ethical Response-ability in Karen Barad’s Mattering
Symposium:
- ISEA2020: 26th International Symposium on Electronic Art
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More presentations from ISEA2020:
Session Title:
- The Planetary: Water Ways
Presentation Title:
- Art and Science Intra-action of Collecting Water from Fog: Ethical Response-ability in Karen Barad’s Mattering
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Water is the essence of life on our planet and yet, due to climate change and multinational politics of profit, water and access to clean drinkable water are diminishing on an unprecedented scale. The art&science Mist Collector project addresses water shortage by looking at a new paradigm of collecting water from fog. In my presentation I will use Karen Barad’s theory of ‘agential realism’ that inspired by quantum theory, considers ‘matter’ as an active agent that dissolves boundaries of dualistic thinking (matter/mind, animate/non-animate, human/non-human, sentient/non-sentient), to demonstrate how through art and science “intra-action” – which means onto-epistemological inseparability, we can bring forward imaginative solutions and produce poetic messages that are able to create a more acute awareness of the global water situation.
I consider our research as a platform of “dynamic relationality”, in which the public is invited to enact an “ethical response-ability” by engaging with the artworks’ space, time and matter processes. Mist Collector, by bringing ‘humanity’ to the scale of a single drop of water and by embarking the visitor aboard an Earth sized vessel sailing in the fog, states the necessity for all sentience – human and “inhuman” (outside the binary of human/non-human) to start building a shared narrative, an uncertain shadow of an ever failing ecosophic Future/Present/Past that may still be shaped and imagined together.
