Feral participations: exploring art and the creaturely through interspecies practice
MacDonald, Fiona (2022) Feral participations: exploring art and the creaturely through interspecies practice. PhD thesis, University of the Arts London/University for the Creative Arts.
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This art research project develops strategies to challenge and loosen anthropocentrism in art through its vulnerable, responsive and speculative approach to art participations with other species. ‘Feral participations’ bring the labile energy of experimental art into spaces of care and attentiveness for and with real, situated beings. The practice is ‘feral’ in its crossings and connections with other-than-human beings and beyond human realms. The ‘vulnerable artmaking’ of feral participation is porous and playful, exploring diverse aesthetics and foregrounding distinctive creaturely subjectivities. A responsive, additive approach to methods acts as a model for expanded dialogue with other species, which extends the concept of the dialogical aesthetic in participatory art. Through this, ethics and aesthetics become irrepressibly entwined.
This thesis proposes ‘unknowing’ as a concept for interspecies practice, which articulates how the human artist consciously delimits their expectations of other-than-human participants to open space for new distributed knowledge to emerge. It develops ‘speculative anthropomorphism’ as a tool to imaginatively adopt differing creaturely perspectives and bring together alternative sources of knowledge that offer fresh approaches to human ideas and problems, and challenge epistemological hierarchies. Feral participations generate artworks that create opportunities for human audiences to engage more deeply and imaginatively with nonhuman beings, and perceive them and ourselves in new ways, and co-shape the ethical and aesthetic register in which art is made and received.
The research draws selectively from participatory art, feminist new materialisms and indigenous animisms, as well as the writing of Deleuze and Guattari, to articulate the affective dynamics of feral participations, which position other-than-human subjectivities (for example ants) as specifically powerful and influential within a creative assemblage. What currently occupies a position outside art (the gestures, forms and markings of the nonhuman) is brought into its purview. All beings are brought forward as persons, and their societies as cultural containers of knowledge and creativity, with and from which humans can learn.
This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Fine Art at The University of the Arts London with University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury.
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