Cosmopolitical Futures and Quantum Entanglement
Rogers, Kathleen (2019) Cosmopolitical Futures and Quantum Entanglement. In: Experimental & Expanded Animation, 13 February 2019, UCA Farnham, Surrey, UK. (Unpublished)
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This presentation revisits a series of investigations manifested as on-going video and sound installation and artworks, Tremor (2007) Cocoon (2009) Tremoring’s (2017). The original laboratory based visual investigations were based on the production of video microscopy materials in the scientific context of developmental biology, transgenic bio technology and zebrafish genomics. I believe the work importantly continues to open up discrete physiological process to view in ways that raise questions on approaches to scientific visual information and how this interpreted and shared in social and cultural domains. The works raise debates within contemporary ethical and planetary contexts. The artistic investigations present extreme close up evaluations of mutant zebrafish at an early life embryonic stage and are filmed at various scales to visually express and capture the essence of the life force as movement, but also show, paradoxically, that the human agency making and unmaking the organism requires a pathological trespass into the mystery it seeks to reveal. In microscopic studies of embryonic life forms, visual distortions, physical vibrations, shadows, reflections, scratches, and microbial parasites randomly appear. Awkward co-ordination of eye and hand movements, control of the image and the limitations of a fixed viewpoint engage the researcher and audience in series of visceral and physiological readings. The physical contact of observation through the microscope viewer and lens creates tremors and palpitations that are tactile and reactive. The embryonic organism is fragile and will likely perish as a result of these human interventions.
My presentation will evaluate these original artistic documentations within intersecting interdisciplinary critical theories that include Barad’s radical philosophical ontology that encourages us to re-consider the methods, ethics, sentience and value of encounters such as these in the conceptual context of quantum physics. Barad re-interprets Bohr’s philosophical insights and formulation of “complementarity” in the quantum world to assert the essential wholeness and entanglement of quantum matter, and her “diffractive methodology” draws on the paradox that as observers making measurements of world, we can only ever have partial and diffracted knowledge of it as something out there and separate. Her proposition that agency and otherness resides in and is entangled in the quantum field of all matter intersects with my arts research and artworks, past and present that reflect a long-time interest in foundational studies in theories of quantum physics. Barad forms part of an emergent zeitgeist in cultural theory and philosophy making connections between vitalist materialism, science, politics and ethics. The term Cosmopolitics borrows from volume title collections authored by the chemist and philosopher Stenger’s looking at the role of science in society and her vision of world politics linked to ideologies of the contemporary scientific enterprise. Bennett builds a case and theoretical manifesto to explores the science and philosophy of the vitalistic entangled organism. Whilst Braidotti draws on post human theory to elucidate an enquiry that recognizes our being trans-species, embodied, embedded and in symbiotic relation with the ecology of planetary life.
The aim of this the paper was to provide a theoretical revision of a series of historical and a linked current artwork – previously commissioned for exhibitions and publications within art and the life sciences contexts that broadly explored the implications and anxieties brought about by advanced scientific research that challenges boundaries between human and non-human, biological, subject and object.
The projects are considered important because they offer interpretative challenges – produced within the artistic community of Bio-art that represents a crossover of art and biological sciences with genes, cells, animals and plants as new forms of media In bio-art, the intrinsic processes of life and genetic evolution are harnessed in collaborative projects to create synthetic living entities and transgenic hybrids. The art produced can be controversial and ethically challenging and these practices have offered significant new areas for scholarship and enquiry in critical and cultural theory.
The projects and writings around Tremor and Cocoon were well circulated at the time – the works presented in different museums and in art and science anthologies and journals.
My main argument for revisiting them has been to review an archive of unpublished footage and to envisage the exhibited and published works within the feminist materialist discourse of Karen Barad and her radical onto-epistemology, that she calls Agential Realism. Barads book, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning provides the basis of AR as a series of conceptual frameworks that fundamentally re-conceives matter as an active agent in its own materialisation. Unpublished footage archive materials were presented within a panel - New Materialist and Posthumanist perspectives chaired by Dr Vicky Smith.
Conference organisers: Professor Nicky Hamlyn and Dr Vicky Smith.
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