This volume gathers research at the intersection of art and the interdisciplinary humanities to develop an understanding of media assemblages that insist on the generativity of their situatedness within ecologies of practice. These contributions propose media assemblages that enlarge the time and space for co-compositions between media and bodies that reshape subjective, perceptual, and affective registers of experience. Media assemblages include photography, performance, criticism, curation, installation, animation, collage, video and VR, as well as archival and somatic practices. Research as a form of practice is a key orientation in this volume since it offers a means of engaging the world-making proposition offered by Isabelle Stengers that practices are specified through irreducible entanglements that cause one to think, feel, and hesitate. The generative linkages between different disciplinary approaches for engaging research practice across the arts and humanities are favoured over disciplinary and media-based exclusivity. When practice is not posed as an intervention or counterpoint to scholarly research or in opposition to the discursive, differences emerge, not based on convention but through the situatedness of emergent insight. The goal is thus not to forward a reproducible formula for knowledge creation but to weave the conditions for utterances both within and in excess of discipline, convention, and establishment. How can research engender the making of communities between, across, and in excess of institutional frameworks through the emergent affinities, postures, and formats of evolving and inclusive forms of research? This volume is a valuable reference for researchers/practitioners within the arts and humanities as it exemplifies both critical and situated methods for developing interdisciplinary research as a means of transforming the terms of research itself.
Nicole De Brabandere (PhD) is a Visiting Researcher at McGill University, working at the intersection of experimental media practice and theories of corporeality. Her current research develops material practices alongside artifacts of computer vision that lend new insight into the generative animacies of A.I., including its affective and aesthetic effects. De Brabandere has hosted experimental media workshops across Europe and North America and has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles on topics spanning drawing, choreography, habit, research-creation, material culture, critical theory, and artificial intelligence. De Brabandere's PhD thesis entitled "The Matter of Habit: Experimenting with the Affects of Emergent Media, Material and Movement Practices" (2017) was developed as part of the PhD cooperation between the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and the University of Arts, Linz, and received the 'Award of Excellence' by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education. The work was also supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). De Brabandere has also taught and designed courses bridging theoretical and practice-based techniques within the arts and interdisciplinary humanities at the undergraduate and master's levels in Europe and North America. De Brabandere is a collaborator member of Hexagram, an interdisciplinary network dedicated to research-creation in art, culture and technology, located in Tiohtià ke/Montreal, Canada, and a reviewer for the 'Journal for Artistic Research' and 'NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies'.
