While contextualising the methodological development of this artistic research project, I have adopted a quantum-like approach. As I engage with the artistic areas and practices in this chapter, I will therefore move non-linearly through time, jumping between modernist and contemporary references. This is because I have observed that novel future understandings influence our reading of the past just as much as our histories shape the present. [1] To fully account for the methodological mechanisms of the research, I will also cross aesthetic disciplines, including speculative fiction, Live Action Role Play, other artistic research, as well as academic research practices and theory.

This will be presented under four headings:

·       Conversation with Art History – 4th Dimension in Modernism.

·       Conversation with Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction.

·       Conversation with Contemporary Artists and Researchers.

·       Conversation with Relevant Theory.

  CONVERSATION WITH ART HISTORY –
4^TH DIMENSION IN MODERNISM

This research project draws on scientific and mathematical approaches to understanding the world, as well as imaginary and speculative approaches from art and literature. As a methodological driver, it engages with a historical period where these two realms converge—specifically, when early 20th-century artistic avant-gardes and writers drew inspiration from contemporary scientific conceptions of non-Euclidean, n-dimensional geometry to challenge the worldviews of their time.

To substantiate my own methodology, I draw on art-historical sources that have mapped this context. [2] These art historians argue that the modernists' responses to new scientific conceptions of the material world had a significant influence on cultural development, a fact that has been underrepresented in the canonical understanding of artistic progress. Thus, there is fertile ground to explore when considering how artistic research can contribute to a broader field of knowledge. One generative research enquiry has therfore been to ask what might happen if this contemporary artistic research project draws on this history and engages in interdimensional speculation today.

I have mapped this historical context in a lecture, which is shown in the video documentation below, and I invite the reader to view it as part of the reflection.

Dimensions:

"No concept that has come out of our heads or pens marked a greater forward step in our thinking, no idea of religion, philosophy, or science broke more sharply with tradition and commonly accepted knowledge, than the idea of a fourth dimension."  

- Edward Kasner and James Newman, “Mathematics and the Imagination”.

This project positions itself in the lineage of artists working with inspiration from science and technology, specifically drawing on theoretical physics mathematical concepts of dimensions as a generative framework. The Western physics context posts that it is fundamental to our experience of the world, that it exists in three spatial dimensions. With the added dimension of time, scientists claim to record all visible events in the universe. The development of this geometrically embedded perspective on existence, has ushered in various paradigms of how we understand reality.

Since the turn of the 19th century, the scientific rupture of warping non-Euclidean geometry has inspired artists and writers. [3] After 1915, when Einstein introduced a fourth dimension in the geometric theory of gravitation—General Relativity—it exploded in the imagination of the artists of its day. Art historian Linda Henderson claims that “the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry emerge as the most important themes unifying much of modern art and theory.” She further elaborates on how these ideas greatly impacted the development of cubism and supremacist abstraction through the art of Jean Metzinger, Juan Gris, Picasso [4], Malevich as well as in the art of Marcel Duchamp. [5] Henderson argues that interdimensional speculations of the avant-garde had a political edge, as a revolt against an oppressive positivism and vulgar materialism that stifled creative expression in their time. [6]

This PhD draws on art historical arguments like Henderson's, which claim that the avant-garde's break with the representational was highly influenced by literature referencing the higher-dimensional, non-Euclidean geometry of mathematician Georg Bernhard Riemann. Through this understanding, interdimensional speculation influenced the modernist project overall, which hoped for a similar revolutionary shift in the aesthetic and formal realms, allowing artists to break free from classical linear perspective representation and subsequently from the boundaries of the visual, the material, and normative or rational aspects of society.

As mentioned in the lecture, there were many different strategies for how the various art movements engaged in interdimensional or higher-dimensional speculation. Cubism engaged with geometrical complexity and the formal suggestion of windows into invisible worlds. Suprematist Abstraction tried to convey the physiological experience of four-dimensional cosmic consciousness. Duchamp, involved in many artistic movements, used the fourth dimension in his work, linking it to mental activities like imagination, intuition, and reason, and seeing it as a conceptual tool to become a new kind of artist. The Surrealists were interested in the revolutionary philosophical implications of these curved geometries and how they could challenge cherished beliefs, institutions, and truths. Charles Tamkó Sirató, the founder of the Dimensionist movement, engaged with additional dimensions and their evolutionary implications to create an overarching model of modernist medium-based expansion.

Towards the mid-20th century, the scientific establishment abandoned the search for hidden dimensions. However, by the 1980s and 1990s, new developments in theoretical physics, supported by computer graphics as mathematical modelling tools, led interdimensional physics to resurface. String theory, M theory, quantum field theory, and supersymmetry offer proposals for the unification of general relativity with particle physics and the simplification of forces combined in higher dimensions. For their mathematical consistency, these theories all require that matter and energy fold through extra dimensions of spacetime, proposing universes with up to 26 dimensions. [7] The outcomes of these models include complex interdimensional geometrical jumps, folds, symmetries, as well as predictions of multiverses, parallel universes, micro-universes, universes as flattened membranes, wormholes, and intergalactic lightspeed travel. I have found that this offers a rich field for artistic spatial, kinaesthetic, and cognitive movements, which seems somewhat uncontextualized and unexplored within contemporary art. In addition, the present-day correlation between complex hyperspace geometry and the digital seems fitting to explore in this context, as hyperlinking, duration, and malleability are introduced.

Looking at historical sources of how artists were stimulated by scientific mathematical ideas of dimensions has helped me to lay a foundation for my own ideas. These modernist practices have inspired me quite directly while developing the methodology and themes of this project. I believe there is a speculative potential in the prism of expanded, entangled dimensionalities that feels generative for freeing up reflection and opening towards a more expanded relationality. The complexity of higher-dimensional folding also seems increasingly apt for reflecting on the exponential complexity of contemporary society. As such, I align myself with the interest of the avant-gardes in challenging objectivist and positivist viewpoints, as well as a form of materialism now hyper charged by neoliberal dynamics. Additionally, it has been stimulating to explore how interdimensional speculation might enable a movement between context and content and offer potential for exploring how we relate to and regard what is beyond perception or cognitive scope.

That being said, the project is not, and cannot be, a modernist avant-garde project. It does not support the premise of linear progress or believe in the utopian transformative potential of a formalist innovation that is abstracted, “free,” and non-situated. The universalist and highly Eurocentric strands of the modernist project, as well as the Western scientific paradigm, are highly problematic—a fact that I discuss throughout the reflection because these dynamics have encroached on this project along the way. In turn, I have been engaged in a continuous questioning of how interdimensional speculation can be relevant in a contemporary artistic research context. This has led to reflections that I implicitly elaborate on throughout and explicitly focus on in the chapter “Performative Installations as More-Than-Human Beings”.

There have been aspects of the developments following Charles Tamkó Sirató’s DIMENSIONIST MANIFESTO (1936) that I will highlight here because it has been especially generative for the project. To reiterate, the manifesto stated that current progress in geometry, mathematics, and physics, exemplified by Einstein’s fourth dimension of space-time and related non-Euclidean concepts, as well as new technological developments of the day, all contributed to liberating art from previous boundaries. The development of modernist art could now be seen as a movement up through dimensions, where one medium would fold into another medium of a higher dimension. “Literature leaving the line and entering the plain (planar/figure poetry), painting quitting the plain and entering space, sculpture stepping out of closed, immobile, dead forms…and entering Minkowski’s four-dimensional space” (Kinetic art), and finally, the manifesto proclaimed that a whole new art form would arise: Cosmic art. “The Vaporisation of Sculpture… matter-music… The human being, rather than regarding the art object from the exterior, becomes the centre and five-sensed subject of the artwork, which operates within a closed and completely controlled cosmic space.” [8]

Throughout development, I have found it inspiring to look at Sirató’s predictions of a future Cosmic space of art. Inadvertently, I have been curious about how Sirató's vision for a future art might align with the folding logic of the performative installations that have emerged in this project. As such, pondering the possibility of a contemporary Cosmic Art has stimulated me to push my own methodology further.

The programme of the Manifesto, charting artistic development as “an expanding movement up through dimensions,” also fits with how this contemporary artistic research project is both multi-medial and interdisciplinary.

It has been interesting to observe that by folding artistic media into hyperspace in his prediction of a future Cosmic Art, Sirató ended up predicting something very close to the expanded multimedia field that the modernist project would evolve into just a few decades later. This expanded artistic landscape is expressed through the formats of Installation, New Media Art, and Performance. Largely arising in art after the 1960s and characterised by a move away from an object-oriented approach towards an emphasis on context, interactivity, duration, immateriality, and ephemerality, as well as an intricate interrelation between artist, artwork, and spectator. [9] It has been intriguing to "discover" that dimensional inflation in art might be a parallel art-historical path or simply another way of charting the same development. As such, this research project is well placed at the junction where the opening of interdimensional perspectives is facilitated by the breaking down of medium boundaries, an aspect that has significantly informed the methodological development of the project.

In terms of influence, I would say that Marcel Duchamp has been an inspiration both as an artist and as an artistic researcher. I find it richly engaging to examine how Duchamp conducted his artistic development in such a systematic and rigorous way. Additionally, his reflections, made available through talks and books as well as the Green Box and the White Box, exemplify a highly successful form of artistic reflection. Duchamp conducted an in-depth study of hyperspace speculation, yet he transcends even this definition of his work. I must admit that I am quite inspired by how he remains dedicated to the role of art and artist as constantly moving, perpetually suspended between the known and the unknown.

I have been influenced by how Kazimir Malevich, drawing from Charles Howard Hinton, aimed for the encounter with the artwork to “educate the audience’s space sense” by moving them into an expansive cosmic space of free flow, relating more openly to left/right, up/down, and internal/external orientation. I have tried to articulate this differently, operating in a multimedia field, and also intending this transgressive movement to invite other reflective responses than Malevich’s. However, there might be an argument for a utopian streak in this project, hoping to affect the audience so that they better align with the world somehow. However, this might not be more than what Critical Theory and Constructivist science paradigms assert, stating that “research is not seen as worthy or ethical if it does not help to improve the reality of the research participants.” [10]

I also want to highlight the inspiration of modernist artists Sophie Tauber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay. In their own ways, these artists engaged with interdimensional speculation through abstracted formalist innovation in painting, yet did not confine themselves to the autonomous space of Fine Art. By engaging with clothing and graphic design, set design for filmmaking, and puppetry, they became early examples of artists who not only transgressed media boundaries but also disciplines. Interdisciplinarity seems to be a central part of developmental innovation in artistic research, and as such, both Arp and Delaunay can be seen as inspirations. However, there is also a feminist aspect in how they situate abstracted formalism in the human body and specific, gendered subjectivities. In my view, it is this situated and materialised development in their work that makes them contribute something important to interdimensional speculation. This has influenced me to adopt a more situated approach in my own work and offered direction for how interdimensional speculation can be made relevant in a contemporary context. I elaborate on this in the chapter “Performative Installations as More-Than-Human Beings”.

In the following paragraph, I highlight later artists who have informed my research through their engagement with interdimensional speculation in the context of the Dimensionist manifesto. One example is the art movement of Spatialism, founded by Italian artist Lucio Fontana in the 1940s and 50s. Like Sirató’s Cosmic space, Fontana suggested an art intended to synthesise colour, sound, space, movement, and time into a new type of art. He aimed to move from the 2D plane of painting to “concrete space” and unite art and science to project colour and form into these spaces via neon lighting and television. This was a precursor to New Media art and Environment art, the latter being a precursor to Installation art. [11] This avenue of research has likewise led me to the kinetic art of Gianni Colombo. His installations of moving lines of light and neon string, as well as curved and tilted spaces, have informed my own spatial installation explorations. [12] In this historic lineage, I can also mention the spatiodynamic sculptures and spaces of Nicolas Schoffer, who was active between the 50s and 70s. He contextualised his work as Cybernetic, as New Media, and as kinetic works, and has been placed in the lineage of Sirató’s manifesto. [13]

When mapping the field, I have found that the interest in interdimensional movement lost momentum in the arts by the mid-20th century and has not resurfaced as a clear thematic or methodological framework in our contemporary landscape, as it has in science. Therefore, when situating my work within a contemporary context, I draw on a more eclectic set of references as I attempt to chart my own discursive map.

CONVERSATION WITH

SCIENCE FICTION/SPECULATIVE FICTION

When clarifying my position as a contemporary artist-researcher working with expanded and interrelated dimensionality, I have drawn on the field of literary science fiction/speculative fiction. [14]

I realised that movement between dimensions is fundamentally a mathematical exercise and, therefore, inherently speculative. Considering expanded dimensionalities, or hyperspace, is also a speculative endeavour because it pushes us beyond our perceptions, to the edge of our cognitive scope. To develop a more robust methodological map, I have aimed to articulate the speculative as a method more clearly within it.

Here, I have found that literary theory offers a more comprehensive and in-depth articulation of how the speculative works. In the chapter "Interdimensional Artistic Speculation", I elaborate on how literary theorist Robert Scholes’s definition of “Speculative Fabulation” and Darko Suvin’s concept of “Estrangement” account for the mechanisms in speculative fiction or science fiction. I then describe how I have merged these literary methods with interdimensional formal movements from modernism into an overall methodology that I have coined INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION.

Interdimensional artistic speculation has provided a useful methodological map to engage through the development work in the PhD. It has been a valuable tool to account for how I work with movements in narrative structure, as well as physical, spatial, and technological movements in the installation. As such, the field of literature has been a great source for exploring expanded, twisting, and folding interdimensional moves, especially because text is freed from physical limitations and readily opens up to speculative jumps and folds.

It is interesting to note that literary development, in contrast to the area of fine art, has maintained a continual lineage of interdimensional speculation throughout its history. Early Victorian literature, such as Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884) and the Scientific Romances of Charles Howard Hinton, has informed the PhD on how mathematical models of interdimensional movement and fourth-dimensional space can be used as speculative tools to expand imagination. These sources have also inspired the development of geometrical ways to structure narrative movements and stimulated ideas for my own fabulations.

As I have traced the history, I have also looked at writers inspired by Hinton and Abbott, such as H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Italo Calvino, through to later writers of hyperspace science fiction and speculative fiction like Madeleine L'Engle, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wanda Macintyre, Liu Cixin, Ted Chiang, N.K. Jemisin, and Jorge Luis Borges. Throughout development, these specific writers have been a source of inspiration in how to fold perspectives of internalised/externalised worlds and invisible/visible interplay. This literature has also loosely influenced how I structure the speculative fabulations in the lectures/storytelling sessions of the performative installations, as well as the thematic and conceptual frameworks for different pieces.

In the chapter “Interdimensional Artistic Speculation,” I highlight instances where specific literary works are engaged.

CONVERSATION WITH

CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND RESEARCHERS

When situating my work within a contemporary context, I draw on a more eclectic set of references than those explicitly engaging in interdimensional speculation. However, I can see a possibility to place them in this contextual lineage through how I map my own contemporary interdimensional speculation.

Specific contemporary artists working in the expanded media fields of installation, new media, and performance have been important dialogue partners throughout development.

From a medium-based perspective of installation, I have looked at the immersive architectural environments of artist Thomas Saraceno, as well as his writings. [15] An inspiration has also been the narrative, total installations of Ilya Kabakov, and how Allan Kaprow worked with viewer inclusion and text in his environments. In terms of developing the form of "performative installation" as a response to modernist avant-garde practices, I have found it very stimulating to look at how the Brazilian Neo-Concrete artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica responded to the more rigid geometrization of the earlier Concrete Art movement by engaging organic, participatory, and expressive dimensions in their installations, as well as sculptures and wearable art. [16]

Where Installation merges with New Media, I have been stimulated by looking at the interactive and augmented environments of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Chris Coleman, and Laurie Anderson. [17]

In terms of performative lectures, a format that artists often use as an extension of very eclectic mixed media practices, as well as practices that are research-based, I have been informed by the work of John Cage, Erik Bünger, Laure Prouvost, and Doug Fishbone. However, a closer study has been afforded to artists Mark Leckey and Laurie Anderson. Formally, they fuel their media/installation/performative practices with narratives that elicit a layered, distributed folding in the audience experience. In addition, they explicitly reference scientific sources and interdimensional movement within their works. [18]

In terms of contextualising the installation-based textile/rope/sound work “Pulling the Earth Strings”, I am aware of the seminal piece “Music on a Long Thin Wire” by experimental composer Alvin Lucier, as well as the Long String performances by composer Ellen Fullman. [19]The sound-weaving installations of artists Hilde Hauan and Maia Urstad have also been stimulating to research, as well as the interactive textile/sound work of artist Pearla Pigao. [20]To inform the development of the rope and textile installations, I have looked at Alisa Dworsky and Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam’s crochet installations, Chiharu Shiota’s string installations, as well as how Magdalena Abakanowicz has engaged with textile works involving rope. [21]

Artistic research:

Throughout development, the artistic works have gained a more open structure, where the performative installations take on the process-based and developmental aesthetics of a workshop, panel discussion, or seminar. In the chapter “Performative Installations as Multimedia Sites,” I elaborate on this development and cite the practice of Performative Lectures as well as an increased didactic or informative aesthetic arising in research-based art as an influence. [22]

Here, I will mention examples of how other artistic researchers structure their methodological frameworks and how this has influenced the development of my research project.

I have looked at the practice-based artistic PhD project Embodied Lines: Creating Witness through Perceived, Bodily, and Imagined Lines by Mike O'Connor (Vrije University Amsterdam). Even though O'Connor comes from the area of contemporary dance, the project draws some interesting parallels to my own development. It has been intriguing to see how O’Connor engaged with dimensionality, specifically the LINE, both as a topic and research method, and how this has manifested in his artistic results. O’Connor has defined a research term and methodology of Embodied Lines, which he argues has allowed him to explore experiences across the mind, body, and environment. I see similarities in how he embodies dimensional concepts to reflect across mind, body, and environment, relating to my own development where mind/body reflections have led to an environmental focus. O'Connor has also conducted interactive, performative lectures where he embodies the line, shares his research, and experiments with audience responses. This interestingly relates to how my own work has become more interactive and workshop-like. [23]

Within the area of explicit dimensional artistic research, I want to mention Kaat Vanhaverbeke’s master project, Extra-dimensional Accordion Playing Using a Surround Sound System. It has been relevant to examine how Vanhaverbeke has defined her research method of expanded dimensions in the aesthetic field of music. Additionally, it has been informative to see how she has translated the hyperspatial into the expansion of her media area, in a way similar to my project. There is also an interesting correlation in how this expansion is achieved through the digital technology of surround sound processing, paralleling my work with immersive interactive video and immersive sound. [24]

Towards the later stages of my research, when I began to engage viewer participation through embodiment, haptics, and tactility, it has been stimulating to examine how tactile interaction is structured in a workshop format in the interdisciplinary research project Thresholds of Touch by Marloeke van der Vlugt (HKU University of the Arts, University of Humanistic Studies), Carey Jewitt (UCL), and Falk Hubner (Fontys). It has been inspiring to see how these researchers created a workshop as 'an interactive performance experiment to explore tactile behaviour and the reciprocity of touching.' The way the workshop guides participants through different zones or stages of engagement, to explore touch and facilitate conversation and sharing around these experiences, has influenced how I set up the scenography and scripted guiding framework for my own performative installations. Exploring the strengths of these experimental research forms has encouraged me to make my engagement more open and workshop-like in its structure. [25]

Other research projects that have inspired the development of formats balancing between an explorative, participatory workshop and a public performance sharing are Hybrid Entanglements: A Posthuman Dramaturgy for Human-Robot Relationships by Petra Gemeinboeck (University of New South Wales, AU), Costume Agency by Christina Lindgren and Sodja Lotker (KhiO), and Quantum Society by author and choreographer Sara Gebran. [26] In the latter example, I participated in a public performative activation and reading of the publication Quantum Society with Gebran, alongside PhD artist researcher colleagues Karen Werner and Kjersti Sundland at Radio Multe [27], in Bergen in 2023. Immersing myself in the experiments that combined text, body, radio broadcast, and performance added a dimension that stimulated the development of my own frameworks for participatory and performative research.

Live Action Roleplaying:

As I transitioned from performative storytelling and lecturing to exploring participatory, dialogue-based formats like panel discussions and seminars, I began to draw on methods from Live Action Roleplay (LARP). [28] During this development, I looked at artists who also use methods from LARP. Nina Essendrop and Susan Ploetz are examples of artists exhibiting work in an art context, as well as staging artistic experiences as LARPs or workshops. I found their practice relevant because they draw on speculative/fantasy themes, worldbuilding, gameplay structures, and audience participation to create time-based, immersive works that offer new perspectives to those involved. [29]

In terms of being informed by LARP mechanisms, the best way is to take part in gameplay directly. Throughout the development of this PhD project, I have therefore participated in several LARPs. [30] One specific LARP will be highlighted in this text. It was an experiment from 2022, initiated within the Machine Vision project, run by Jill Rettberg (Department of Linguistic, Literary and Aesthetic Studies at UiB), to explore how live-action roleplay can be an academic research method. The Machine Vision project explores the effects of machine vision (e.g., facial recognition, emotion recognition, deepfakes, automatic image manipulation) in contemporary society. The LARP featured a future world, “the Civilization,” a surveillance society controlled by an AI called “The Intelligence” in a world of desolate and environmentally depleted outlands. Participants consisted of academics and seasoned role players who took on the roles of applicants to enter the Civilization at a centre that received new immigrants. This was housed at the University Museum in Bergen, with props, costumes, and technology designed to fit the world and characters. I played a former borderland trader, Villem Air, who used manipulation and cunning to reach a high position in the Civilization. The game was set up as an extended seminar, with an introductory day, including lectures about machine vision, a day of the actual LARP, and a debrief workshop day discussing the pedagogical potential of the LARP format. This experience allowed me to explore how play immersion can aid reflection and how this can be used as a research method. It provided me with a good cross-disciplinary network of professionals to discuss with and informed the development of my own performative installations as immersive research sites.

CONVERSATION WITH

RELEVANT THEORY

To inform the research development, I have also looked at relevant theorists and thinkers along the way.

At the start of the research period, I aimed to gain a better understanding of the histories of dimensional conceptualisation to stimulate how I could engage these concepts aesthetically, bodily, and performatively. Here, I drew on the writings about hyperspace by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, the writings on geometry and topology of two- and three-dimensional spaces by geometer Jeffrey R. Weeks, and the scientific conceptions of time by theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli. These works informed my research, supplementing the sources that modernist artists examined and offering a more nuanced and updated understanding of dimensions. [31]

To help me chart how I link the physical/material installation work with the text-based folding of dimensional concepts, I have engaged with the theoretical ideas of orientation developed by Social Studies professor Sara Ahmed. In her book “Queer Phenomenology,” Ahmed explores how we are physically situated in space and time, and how this orientation or disorientation can be correlated to our psychological, social, and political positioning. [32]

Initially, I had set as a prerequisite for the PhD project the assumption that there is a correlation between complex hyperspace geometry and the digital. As I engaged with digital technology through the artistic development, I also wanted to inform my position through reading. Initially, I explored various critical artistic approaches that could be relevant for this project, with help from the book “Contemporary Art and Digital Culture” (2017) by Melissa Gronlund. Here, I also engaged with “The Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway and “What is the Measure of Nothingness?” by Karen Barad. I then moved on to “We Are Data” by John Cheney-Lippold, and “Psychopolitics” by Byung-Chul Han, as well as technology-related essays by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and essays on social media cultures by Joshua Citarella. The latter sources led me to a contemporary “technology-pessimistic” outlook, where the development of digital technology is mainly considered in terms of cognitive capitalism and how neoliberal forces control online life. This aligned with my initial premise outlined in the PhD proposal, that "our engagement with digital technology seems to be about striving for an ideal of power, free movement, and access, which, while being granted, might also downgrade or flatten our experience as much as it expands it." However, as the project developed, I increasingly sought to nuance my reflections on the consequences of digital technology through a more embodied and networked artistic approach. Using a map of different positions within posthumanist technology discourses, created by researcher Tamar Sharon, I realised that my approach to the digital was more focused on how humans are entangled with and mediated by technologies as co-constituent factors. These cannot be easily categorised as simply 'good' or 'bad', but should instead be explored and articulated within these entanglements. Consequently, I decided that reflections on digital technologies would be expressed more implicitly through the artistic works themselves, a point I elaborate on in the later chapters of this reflection. [33]

As the project's interconnected and distributed nature emerged more clearly, it led to the exploration of how the performative installation might operate as an entangled, more-than-human entity, and how the reflections of such a distributed consciousness could contribute insights about the consequences for our biologically and digitally embedded existence. To support this exploration, I drew on Network and Systems Theory to inform the project and decided to situate it within a new materialist framework. As covered in the introduction, the cybernetics thinker Gregory Bateson became a central source. Other important new materialist thinkers I have engaged with are philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, and Karen Barad, a scholar of feminist theory and philosophy of science. [34]

While developing this research project, I have chosen to engage extensively with Donna Haraway, as she is a scholar who reflects across the fields of biology and consciousness, as well as science and technology. Her essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto" (1985), has been an early source, helping me to think beyond rigid boundaries between 'human' and 'animal', as well as 'human' and 'machine'.

Throughout her work, Haraway articulates a recurring critique of the limiting aspects of science that celebrate individual thinkers and ideas. She suggests that an important aspect of developing useful knowledge and insight is drawing inventive lines of connection across thinkers, ideas, methodologies, and areas of thought.

This artistic research project situates itself within a similar interrelated orientation, where the contextualisation, methodological mechanisms, and artistic aesthetic formations are not about delimiting areas, but rather about tracing the movements that occur between areas and reflecting on what materialises from this interrelated approach.

In her seminal book Staying with the Trouble (2016), Haraway lays out her interconnected and situated view of our times, describing them “as one in which the human and the non-human are inextricably linked in tentacular practices.” [35] One way Haraway reflects on entanglement and invites us to be aware and responsible for the entanglements of which we are a part is through her fluid concept of SF, which shifts between “science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.” [36] An important aspect of SF is that all these sub-aspects are entangled with one another. I have been inspired by this interrelated structure for my own reflection, as it stimulates my work from many angles and resonates with my approach to practice and reflection. Here, I will try to fold SF around to highlight constellations where it has influenced my project.

The aspect of string figures, tentacular thinking, and co-thinking thought webs with other thinkers has helped me articulate how I engage in co-reflection with the participants, audiences, contributors, supervisors, and colleagues of the project. In turn, this also reflects how I draw from many artistic media as well as other disciplines to create the methodological weave of the project. This expanded inclusion of voices in the conversation has helped me identify the new materialist turn of the project and reinforce a more nuanced view of how the agential biological/technological entangled co-materialisations have arisen. As such, I have found that string figuring closely relates to how I have come to engage with the shifting and folding of relationships through the method of interdimensional movement.

A related aspect of SF is how it entangles the actual and the imaginary through science fiction, speculative fabulation, and science fact. Haraway defines SF as “storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come.” [37] Haraway articulates the link between scientific and artistic methods in speculative fiction as an approach where science fiction and science fact coexist. This has helped me clarify how I draw on methods from literary speculative fiction and science fiction. It has also influenced my choice to use speculative fabulation as a research method in the project, which is part of the overall methodology of interdimensional artistic speculation.

This aspect also includes a more expansive level of the project as artistic research in relation to scientific or academic research. In her elaboration of SF, Haraway states that science fact and speculative fabulation need each other. Here, it is interesting to see how Haraway practises what she preaches. In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway herself draws on practices and ideas from science fiction writers and artists as much as from academic colleagues in various fields of science, as well as indigenous thinkers.

I find that the way Haraway cross-pollinates her academic approach with imaginative and aesthetic practices is mirrored in this project, which aligns with a lineage of aesthetic practices drawing inspiration from science and mathematics. Both approaches engage in a folding between the imagined and the actual. Following Haraway’s argument, this point of cross-pollination may offer something to knowledge practices: more flexible and responsive reflective contributions to what the world needs now. I believe this also indicates how this artistic research project, or artistic research in general, might contribute to a wider research field—an overall reflection that I will return to in more detail in the coming chapters.

Haraway’s articulation of a feminist, embodied, and specific approach as a counter to disembodied and universalist objectivity, which she discusses in her essay “Situated Knowledges,” has also been a useful dialogue partner throughout the PhD project. As I have grappled with the abstracting and universalist tendencies in modernism that this project engages, I have sought a way that extra-dimensional speculation might be relevant in today's contemporary context. [38]