Cart(ont)ology: Mapping Self-as-Network in Three Carts

(Short paper)

Keywords: research-creation, performance, complex systems, networks, semiotics, intervention, assemblage, ontology

We live in a networked world to which we find ourselves entirely ill-adapted, clinging to outdated means of perceiving and understanding our environment. Part art intervention, part philosophical project, cart(ont)ology proposes the convergence of cartographic and ontological approaches to the question of being/becoming. It seeks to account for both individual entity and its networked presence in a single discursive movement. Through the development of three interwoven artworks – a pushcart, inventory-qua-cart, and PCBs-qua-cart – the author explores how we might engender a network sensibility in ourselves which encompasses our relations with not only people but also machines and objects, and which renders us better adapted to act within our networked existence. Embodied across these three scales, the physical carts created serve as abstractions through which to understand networked relations from the local context outwards. They are also a performative investigation into how we might engage in a radically active receptivity as a means of networkoriented perception, encounter, and exchange.