This PhD project explores how we can place ourselves in an active, entangled relationship with that which is both within and beyond our reach. As such, the artistic research seeks to explore ways in which interconnection and movement are central to our existence. This is done by incorporating interconnected movement into the methodology of the artistic research development, to examine how these modulations operate within the artwork, and what formations and articulations arise from the project in turn.

ENTANGLEMENT

Following cybernetic thinker Gregory Bateson's analysis sketched out in the introduction, the project explores how it is possible to view Mind as an entangled circuit between a being and its environment, taking care not to cut or delimit in ways that produce unhelpful otherings, negations, or invisibilities.

One entanglement actively engaged in the project is that between mind and body. The previous chapter aimed to show how the method of INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION goes on through development as an interplay between physical, technical, and embodied movement as well as cognitive, imaginative movement.

This relationship can also be articulated as an interplay between establishing conceptual and physical boundaries and then transgressing them, repeatedly moving back and forth. This continuous cycle of setting and crossing boundaries, both mental and physical, is understood in the project as the folding in and out of hyperspace. The hope is that this trans-dimensional movement can stimulate the transgression of the limits of the human mind as well as the scale of the human.

FROM FORMAL FOLDING

TO AGENTIAL FOLDING

Exploring how the performative installations can speculatively and materially fold as a hypercube has also led to the realisation that this fold involves turning context into content or entangling contexts with each other.

By situating these entangled folds in a multimedia site that arises from post-60s expanded media practices, as well as mirroring Sirató's Dimensionist expansion, a related folding of subject and object takes place. In this space, the surroundings become the central agent, an individual becomes a network or context, the audience becomes the generator of art, and the artist becomes a facilitator. Consequently, the roles of the artistic researcher, the audience, and the artwork have folded and transformed throughout the project.

LEVELS OF REFLECTION

The project therefore offers reflections from all levels of agency within the performative installations. The artist-researcher reflects throughout the development process in an ongoing, expanded conversation with the technical and practical contributors, participating performers, and the work as it evolves. As the audience engages with the work, they also contribute to this reflection.

As more-than-human beings emerge from this mesh of interrelated reflections and articulations, one could argue that the reflection also originates from these expanded beings themselves. The speculative act of granting the performative installations agency as beings serves as the device that activates the coalescing articulations, inviting us to consider the artwork as the entity conducting the reflection.

A NEW MATERIALIST POSITION

This development has led to a new materialist position emerging in the project. Here, materials, media, technologies, and the space itself have taken on agency, becoming part of an artwork that coalesces into something larger than the human subject. Interestingly, this embodiment or movement has occurred within the project not by reading new materialist theory directly, but by engaging in artistic development through constant speculative movements while maintaining an expanded and attentive focus, considering an increasing range of elements as agencies or voices. In a sense, this is also what the project invites the audience to engage with—as active, embodied participants in the work. [1]

INTERACTIVITY

While engaging with this interrelated perspective of the development, I realised that interactivity has become an important aspect of the project. The audience is invited to become participants through connecting with the work, by pulling physical ropes and by engaging with digital sensors. Interactivity can also be said to lie in the invitation for the participants to engage in the more-than-human conversations, and for the audiences to immerse themselves and identify with the narrative speculative fabulations in the project. Throughout all these interactions, the human participants are invited to transgress their own identity limits and become part of a larger conversation, where all agents perform the work. In return, this reinforces the network-based and new material focus of the entangled, more-than-human position.

HOW THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN BEINGS ARISE

The expanded beings are hovering between the state of speculative fabulations and states of physical/material/media-activated actualities. Initially, they are clearly speculative; representational discontinuities with life as we know it. Yet they are present as material installations. The audience is in no doubt that they are in the installation when they are. It is how the installations perform themselves, through narratives, interactive digital technology, and installation elements, that the representational discontinuity, the speculative fabulation, gets animated. This can also be articulated as the more-than-human beings coming alive through folding into expanded and impossible dimensions. A fold, where the imaginary moves towards the real, and the actual and material move towards the impossible, thus pointing back to the actual we know and inviting us to reflect on it.

The larger beings emerge out of all these entangled developmental folds mentioned above. One could say that the work constantly re-forms again and again, as a performative installation, a speculative fabulation, a multimedia installation, a multidimensional site, a distributed cybernetic body, a multi-perspectival mind: a more-than-human being. This inner transformation of the same might also be analogous to doing a cat’s cradle with strings between the fingers of both hands, where the strings are connected in the same way, yet reemerging in different constellations through the various foldings of the hands.

As such, the performative installations are intentionally complex and shifting in form—multidimensional and multi-medial—to elicit contradictory entanglements in understanding that then suspend readily available meanings or gestalt constructions in the audience. Similarly to Robert Scholes' descriptions of speculative fabulation, the aim of these ongoing shifting positions in the performative installations is to keep audience interpretations suspended as long as possible, encouraging them to attend more acutely to what they are in and reflect on it in a novel, expanded, and relational way.

WHY THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN BEINGS ARISE

Through following how these expanded agencies have arisen in the project, I realise that artistic research is about the kind of conversation that happens through development: of engaging aesthetic actions into the site of the artwork and about listening to what comes back. The act of embodying the artwork as a more-than-human being is, in a way, an extension of this as an invitation to listen to the artwork in an intensified and heightened way—both for the artistic researcher during development and for the participants and the audience in the performative unfolding of the work.

The reflections can be articulated as the considerations that then arise in the artistic researcher, the participants, and the performers. Additionally, as the installation is given a wider new materialist type of agency, it can also be articulated as the reflections of the larger beings themselves. This is a type of reflection that is aesthetic, embodied, expanded, distributed, and transgressive. It is a reflection that is curious about how to stretch the mind and the imagination, and, in the same turn, also about how much one can stretch in relation to one’s surroundings.

It is an invitation towards a type of reflective position that does not need to be limited within cognitive consciousness but can rest in paradoxes and complexities and actively engage extensions into invisibilities. Here also lies a hope that this can lead to a better ability to listen to, or regard, that which is normally negated.

In a way, it is an invitation to take an embodied, empathetic, imaginative systems approach to a world that is entangled and complex. What is at stake is our conduct in relation to our environment. By offering the opportunity to identify with larger contexts, it is hoped that the work can invite another form of accountability because this type of identification might actually be more in line with what we really are. In a sense, the project proposes that we try to embody and live by the fact that all living beings are in a symbiotic relationship with each other, and we cannot sever the lines of cohabitation without harming life itself on Earth.

ACTUAL REFLECTIONS

OF EACH MORE-THAN-HUMAN BEING

This artistic research reflection does not seek to interpret the artwork. The larger beings that emerge in this project are intended to quite literally speak for themselves. However, key recurring themes, perspectives, and viewpoints from "Marie Sikveland as a Room," "Store Lungegårdsvannet," "The Art Academy of Bergen," and "The Earth Being of Nordnes" will be more openly explored in the following section.

“Marie Sikveland as a Room”

In many ways, Marie Sikveland's experience of seeing lines on her retina points towards the psychosomatic link between mind and physical body, and how that, in turn, affects our relationship to our surroundings.

Towards the end of the performance, I narrated Marie Sikveland’s experience of flattening out inside an expanding line and eventually becoming a space. The gallery turned dark, and my voice was enhanced by a PA system, giving the effect of spreading the voice so that it seemed to be coming from all the walls of the room. Here, I then continued to share the experience of being a room, and how, as a room—an embodiment of a three-dimensional context—one holds the feeling of care and commitment to be still, step back, and support the content.

Through developing this speculative, spatial folding at the end of the performance, I got to explore how to give subjective agency and voice to a larger context. This focus engaged a curiosity about how it might feel to be a context for someone else. In parallel, this experience involved exploring how I could be more attentive and supportive by stepping into the background, making myself more neutral and still. In a way, I was practising the act of making myself as a human into an invisible context, a movement that I was otherwise trying to reverse in the overall PhD project by giving visibility and voice to contexts. It felt like this move of becoming a context had something to do with care, attentiveness, and adopting a more porous and open sense of self. I was thinking that it might be similar to a pregnant person who becomes a context or world for someone else and might experience a reduction in self-absorption as their embodied perspective shifts.

One might often attribute a lessened self-containment to the fearful or "negative" experience of loss of control, breakdown, and ultimately death, a feeling that Marie Sikveland constantly referred to throughout the performance. However, it is interesting to note that this distributed, expansive move might also offer the opposite: a greater sense of aliveness, attentiveness, and connection.

It might also relate to loosening the cognitive grip of thoughts, allowing one to "be with" the experience more fully. In this way, the installation may not prompt clear thematic reasoning that leads to definitive conclusions. Instead, the art experience could be seen as an invitation to reflect on how to embrace the expansion and redistribution of perspectives—a sort of "falling apart."

It was after this work that I became interested in developing additional aesthetic methods to invite an audience to actively engage with and relate to the context they are in. The experience and subsequent reflections from embodying the expanded Marie Sikveland also led to a shift in focus regarding my own role in the PhD, as I moved from being a central performer to more of a moderator or facilitator.

“Store Lungegårdsvannet” and “The Art academy of Bergen”

Overall, the move of making the performative installations into more-than-human beings is a device to invite reflections on how we deal with our physical environments and engage with the consequences of how we are embedded in the natural/cultural/technological systems around us.

As I elaborate on the more specific perspectives of “Store Lungegårdsvannet” and “The Art Academy of Bergen,” I draw on what reflections arose through the many workshops and public performances of the project. Here, perspectives changed through the different pairings of human/more-than-human. In the section below, I highlight reflections that were clearly recurring and emphasised throughout.

The articulations of the lake, Store Lungegårdsvannet, allowed for a deeper engagement with environmental concerns. However, it quickly became apparent that a new materialist perspective emerged implicitly, one that did not neatly separate the categories of "nature" and "culture" but acknowledged them as intertwined. Store Lungegårdsvannet, having existed for millions of years, contributed a deep time perspective. Yet it was also influenced by human activities and had absorbed various human-made substances, that also shaped their identity as a contemporary, designed entity. This dual understanding mirrored that of the Art Academy in many ways, highlighting shared complexities and interconnected histories.

However, Lungegårdsvannet also offered an opportunity to explore a very different kind of thinking than humans. As a being of water that flows and shifts—breaks up, gathers again, evaporates, sometimes turning to rain, sometimes to ice—they expressed a perspective that embraced change and did not need to fix things rigidly. At times, they referred to themselves as "I," and other times as "we," blending different perspectives that could sound paradoxical or poetic in reflections. They understood things by absorbing them into themselves or merging with other elements, showing a fluidity in their relationality and identification. Additionally, Lungegårdsvannet did not appear very argumentative or opinionated. For instance, they rarely viewed their own inner pollution as "bad," but rather as "less variety" or "more monotony," which might simply be somewhat boring.

A different temporal experience emerged, as on one hand the lake was constantly renewed and did not retain much memory, remaining open to change. On the other hand, they had access to millions of years of experience, and that made them impart a slowness or a sense of being outside of time. The emerging logic resembled that of an ever-flowing dream state, blurring the distinction between a minute and a hundred years, where dreaming and remembering seemed indistinguishable.

The Art Academy offered an opportunity to explore our relationship to institutional systems and to technology more directly. Being composed of numerous human environments, organisational structures, architectural elements, technological systems, and reshaped natural materials, the Art Academy generally appeared quite schizophrenic and elusive in its expressions, however often strongly opinionated. Sometimes, they asserted authority and interest in social hierarchies; at other times, they displayed creativity, wildness, or transgression. They frequently seemed uncertain of themself, including where their boundaries lay—a fact they often problematised. Should they identify with their physical form, the new KMD building of glass and steel, or with the flow of creative human ideas and impulses spanning from Møllendal through to Bergen and beyond? The Academy therefore questioned whether they were local, international, or both, and what that meant.

Both Lungegårdsvannet and the Art Academy expressed a sense of being both human-constructed and biological, in a way, both dead and alive. As mentioned, Lungegårdsvannet had fewer issues with these distinctions, perhaps because they had less human logic inside. The Art Academy, on the other hand, often questioned these distinctions and worried about future changes: What if they were shut down by the state or the University in Bergen? What would they do? Was it beneficial or detrimental to breathe through the efficient yet dry new ventilation tubes in its KMD building body? Were they more efficient now with all the electricity inside themself, or just more stressed? What about the internet flow, the automatic doors, the smart lighting? Sometimes, there was a feeling of being energized, almost high from using these technologies; other times, there was a sense of emptiness, as if being squeezed into something too narrow and rigid.

An important aspect arising in both more-than-human beings was how they expressed having these expanded bodies with porous and shifting boundaries, and how that made them relate to their environment. Very soon after the larger beings started conversing, the environment around them began to proliferate into other more-than-human beings with whom they had relationships. The mountain Ulriken, situated near both the Academy and the lake, became a central friend and lover. Electricity and the Internet transformed into high-intensity, speedy beings. The University in Bergen took on an important authoritative role in relation to the Art Academy. However, the physical/psychological delimitation of these relationships was not clear-cut. Sometimes one larger being would morph into one of the others, or they struggled to describe where they ended or began in relation to each other. Relationships and communication with others were often described as “merging with others” when agreeing and “amputating a limb of oneself” when disagreeing.

Throughout, I find that the more-than-human conversations have offered rich reflective alternatives to approaching relationality. In one sense, it doesn't seem alien to human self-conception to feel a psychological merging with others. However, it's also intriguing to consider that physically and chemically, we do merge with our environment through the extended cloud of hormones and bacteria we all carry around us. This perspective also touches on the more systems-oriented outlook prevalent in contemporary society, where we are viewed as integral parts of societal, social, capitalist, and institutional networks, now also all hypercharged by digital/technological systems. One challenge with a systems approach is that the network itself can become so dominant that individual agency seems irrelevant in effecting change. It's problematic that the systems we are part of exert such significant control over our actions, but mostly because we might not approach it like that. This perspective might be partly invisible to us. If we exclusively focus on individual responsibility and negate systemic influences, we may end up seeking solutions or assigning blame at the individual level, where they may not be effectively addressed.

Overall, this playful, speculative act of giving personhood and voice to systems has affected the kind of reflection mentioned above. For example, it has influenced my approach to being part of an art school institution. As a part of the Art Academy, I notice systemic influences and how I or other individuals sometimes get manipulated or lost in them. However, I also have more patience towards the institutional agencies and textures expressing themselves, and I find it interesting to play with more imaginative and expanded responses when I teach, when I socialise with students and colleagues, when I go to staff meetings, or take part in higher management board meetings.

“The Earth Being of Nordnes”

As I decided to be more attentive to the material, haptic, technological utterings that were part of the more-than-human beings, I let “The Earth Being of Nordnes” speak more on its own material/technological terms, through sounds, textures, and vibrations.

In a parallel way to how the installation turned dark as Marie Sikveland became a room in “Where are We Now?”, I also worked on collapsing the visual distance in this work, by making vibrations, sounds, and haptics the main expression. In a way, I have explored this movement underground and meeting the earth being, as a folding collapse of the spatial into a form of internalised non-dimensionality.

This project has allowed for the exploration of related, however different, aspects of distribution and expanded connectivity, compared to those of the earlier projects. [2] Also, I have been interested in how a decent narrative allows the movement into more expanded dimensionalities. In myth and literature, there are long traditions of stories of going underground, as a way to access another form of temporality and spatiality. [3]

However, this might be a slightly simplified synthesis. The fact is that, as I try to make the materials and technologies talk more on their own terms, it becomes harder to draw thematic points from what the Nordnes being is articulating. This might also be because, like "Store Lungegårdsvannet," the ground area of Nordnes as a being is so large, porous, and expansive that it invites entry into "another logic" altogether. It is this encounter I aim to explore, rather than answer.

I have been interested in how approaching the Nordnes being could invite the human audience to let go of their own identity constructions and become more distributed and porous themselves, perhaps mirroring how soil decomposes. By encountering something more material and distributed, the human tendency to constantly create identity gestalts in whatever we meet might be lessened, yet still held together loosely within the speculative premise of the underground as a being. It might then be possible to see how we are already less formed and closed around an identity and very much wired to become part of something bigger.

Somehow, approaching collapse, disintegration, and death as a productive force resurfaces as a sub-theme. The earth being of Nordnes is both dead and alive, pointing towards ever-returning disintegration or change, but also to the idea that it can never truly disappear. Listening to and connecting with the nonverbal, mute materiality of the non-living may allow us to relate more actively to what we typically negate the most in Western society: death. However, it also shows that death itself is not a singular, delimited entity; death and life processes are part of the same continuum and are essentially about creativity and creation.

If we relate to death as a disconnected aspect, much like we cut off our environment or distinguish sharply between ourselves and what surrounds us, we may fail to learn and only produce misjudgement and pain. In terms of contributing to insight practices (instead of knowledge production), the project might allude to the fact that a disconnected view may lead to simplified and faulty reflections, not to better practices of co-living and surviving on this earth.

THE DIGITAL REFLECTED THOUGH

THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN

Initially, this PhD project stated that it would reflect on the consequences of our “digital/biological entanglements” more explicitly. As the project developed, I realised that this aspect would be reflected implicitly through merging digital and human/biological agencies and movements in the artworks, and through the larger entangled utterings of the more-than-human beings.

In parallel, I started to realise that the objective of the PhD was perhaps not to draw direct conclusions about “consequences for our digitally/physically entangled constitutions” as previously formulated but might instead be a wider reflection on how we humans relate as entangled parts in an interconnected world, not as separate brains with cognitive or technological mastery over this world. How we relate to the invisible, to the complex, to the entangled—without succumbing to the need for simplified delimitations or cognitive mastery. By decentralising the question of the digital, the reflection on digital technology became less instrumental than at the outset of the PhD. The project could still reflect on the consequences of digital technology, but indirectly as part of the medium bodies of the more-than-human beings, and therefore also through what they reflected. In this way, I felt it would be possible to contribute a much more nuanced, artistic reflection on “who we are, as entangled biological/technological/local/global/material/virtual beings.” It would be the perspectives refracted through the lens of the speculative fabulations that would suggest the reflections. A reflection, I hoped, that would lessen the division we otherwise always have between ourselves and the world. As such, I hoped that this performative installation would invite the position of a larger cybernetic mind, as Gregory Bateson spoke about.

Further down in this text, I reflect on how the entangled engagement with technology has affected my own approach as an artist working with digital technology.

HOW THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN BEINGS

RELATE TO EACH OTHER

Speculating on the relationship between "Marie Sikveland as a room," "Store Lungegårdsvannet," the "Art Academy in Bergen," and the "Earth Being of Nordnes," it is evident that they all share a commonality of being Bergen-based. In a way, they form a larger, distributed portrait of Bergen, primarily intended for a Bergen audience.

It is interesting to note that within the logic of these extended, porous more-than-human beings, their bodies overlap. Lungegårdsvannet, as evaporated water, is inside the Art Academy, and as a lake and the ground of the lake, it connects all the way to Nordnes. Gallery Entrée, where Marie Sikveland is a room, is positioned at this point of overlap between the two. The Art Academy, which has human flows stretching into all of these, merges with them all.

Thus, Bergen itself could be seen as the gestalt, perceived through some of its parts. This perspective allows for an endless exploration of symbiotic levels of entities within entities.

THE REFLECTIONS OF

THE ARTISTIC RESEARCHER,

THE PARTICIPANTS,

THE AUDIENCES

This research project is highly relational, as the movements and agency mostly lie in the relations between the persons involved, as well as between the computational and interactive digital components, the materials, and the narrative, speculative beings.

In extension, I have found that on all levels it is very valuable for the research processes that many people are involved, as the ongoing development conversations seem to be the core activity of the artistic research.

In the following section, I will continue exploring the relational entanglements within the performative installations, with the goal of articulating a more grounded ethical standpoint. As I have involved people at various levels in the project—whether as collaborators in development, discursive partners, practical and technical support, co-performers, participants, or artistic co-creators—all these positions have shifted and expanded in the performative installations. Very much in the same way, as the role of the artist researcher and the audience has transformed during the project too. Here, I will actively reflect on the implications of these engagements and strive to ethically situate each position as responsibly as possible.

The artistic researcher

Initially, the artistic researcher has the role of the author, the instigator, and the conceptual/methodological driver of the project. The artistic researcher is also a mediator of the research, and as an artist-performer, sometimes also the material component of the artwork.

As the project has turned the context into the content and expanded to include more participants and agencies, a similar decentred movement has happened to this latter role of the artist as performer. Before the PhD, I often took the role of the central performer in the work, and therefore also the central driver of the narrative unfolding. The awareness of a shift arose when I performed the role of Marie Sikveland in “Where are we now? Where are we now? Where are we now?” and followed her journey of becoming the room, and thus the context that holds all the content. I felt that this position in the work was becoming increasingly interesting and wanted to explore how I, as an artist-performer and researcher, could step to the side and somehow expand to support the other voices arising in the work. Of course, this is what an artist always does on some level: facilitating the artwork to arise. However, the classical role is that of a main source for what arises: that the art somehow originates from the subconscious, imagination, or agency of the artist. Now, this extended listening that I otherwise invited the audience to do while being attentive to the more-than-human somehow also became my role and approach in the PhD: listening, stepping back, and taking more of a supportive role so that these expanded articulations could arise. As such, I still instigated, narrated, and performed in the work, but primarily saw my role as the one facilitating the contextual framework for how the “articulations” of the work unfolded.  Now, I see my role more as a project manager, a gamemaster, a moderator, a host, and a facilitator. Some of these roles, like the moderator, tour guide, and host, I take on in the actual artistic works. Some roles, like the gamemaster and project manager, are the roles of the artistic researcher. I have been thinking that the latter roles might naturally become more articulated for all artists turning artistic researcher, as this seems to be a central part of such activity. I can appreciate that artistic research is essentially about defining a field of conversations and inserting one’s activity into this field, but very much by igniting related conversations and then being the one juggling all these articulations and turning them into a generative and directed reflective flow.

The audience and the participants

Initially, the performative installations are interactive artworks that take on their artistic function when engaged by the audience. The audience are therefore always invited to participate in the work, either by considering their embodiment or perspectives or by directly interacting with the material, technical, and narrative movements of the installations. In this way, the audience become part of the material of the work, which they are then invited to reflect on.

This dynamic has been integral to the work's development and led to the choice of using workshops as an exploration format because this format allowed the integration of audience interaction throughout testing and development. While I explored how test audiences engaged on this level, it became increasingly clear to me that they were more than observers; they were actively involved in the performative articulations of the installation, as, for example, in how they took part in the work as live-action roleplay. Therefore, the term "audience" felt inadequate, and I began referring to these individuals as "participants," to acknowledge their contribution to the creation and content of the work. The work now operates on various levels: participant performers are integral to the performative articulation, while interacting audiences, though more peripheral, still immerse themselves to activate the artistic modalities of the work. In this way, the boundaries between these roles are fluid, and in reflection, I use the terms interchangeably.

As performers playing the roles of the more-than-human beings in “The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension,” the participants contributed very important creative input towards the work. The performing participants invested dedication and empathy to immerse themselves in the expanded more-than-human perspectives and drew from their own experiences and creativity to engage with the articulations of the roles. I realised that this engagement was, in fact, what made the reflections of the more-than-human arise in the installations. Here, I attempt to be mindful and responsive towards ethical considerations of consent, as well as levels of crediting and financial compensation.

Outside the roleplay sessions, the participants also contributed very poignant feedback and reflections towards the work's development. These group reflections on what we were all engaged in became an additional value of the workshop format. Here, the group discussed topics like relationality, the possibility of empathy with our surroundings, how we are affected by the institutional networks we are in, the effect of uncomforting entanglements with technology and electronically controlled architecture, embodied consequences of speed and slowness, as well as where we cut and link up when we give something agency and voice.

Through participant feedback I was able to identify the thematic reflections that might arise in the audience as they experienced the work. The workshop tests also allowed me to explore the expanded perspective I aimed to elicit in an audience by observing how immersion into a more distributed, relational environment perspective worked for the participants. However, I reflected that participating in the workshop as role-playing performers over many days might be a more rewarding way to experience this work. The prolonged immersion might have a much greater transformative effect, which might not be possible to achieve in an audience during an hour-long event.

Many of the participants who played the roles of 'The Art Academy' and 'Store Lungegårdsvannet' over time reported that their relationship to these larger contexts had changed after the workshops. For example, participating art students spoke of relating differently to being in the KMD building of the Art Academy. Where before they had found the glass and steel architecture, and the humming of the open ventilation shafts in the building, uncomfortable and alienating, they later reported feeling more empathetic towards the building and better able to relax in this environment. Other participants talked about experiencing a difference when walking by 'Store Lungegårds' lake. They noticed it more, not just as something to pass by, but as a presence with different moods, that somehow spoke to them.

Being engaged in this form of 'expanded attunement' through the project has had a similarly curious effect on my own relationship with digital and electronic technology. While working with all the machines in installation setups and development, I started playing the role-playing game of giving all the computational components and materials agency and personality. The computer could be glitchy and moody one day, and happier and faster the next. The projector not working might want to tell me something about its relationship with the electrical cables, or just ask for a bit more consideration. I found myself stopping and listening more, not being so eager to just move on and let the machinery work for me. I became more patient and curious with technical hiccups. I also got into this zone of feeling thankful for all the working and buzzing electricity around me, catching myself stroking the ropes or cables and thanking the elements for their contribution. In practical terms, this made the nitty-gritty part of the development work more enjoyable. I also reflected that this countered the efficiency effect that our dealings with technology usually have, of expecting both the machines and ourselves to be faster and more efficient. As I slowed down and became more present in this work, I reflected that maybe time does not get compressed when dealing with digital technology, just because they are built to be exponentially faster and more powerful, but because we don’t regard them, and this makes us less present in the co-creating relationship with them. Also, because I did not internalise the machine logic so readily and unconsciously, and projected some 'human regard' onto the machines in turn, this felt like it contributed to making the relationship more balanced and considered.

In line with this, I reflect that the same dynamics arise in our relationship with the systems that are part of our institutional contexts, especially as they are boosted by digital, networked technologies. While we work with the internet, admin portals, digital planners, as well as decision-making protocols, semester plans, etc., we let the system's modulations control us and set the agenda for how to move and how to act. But we don’t seem to notice that this is what we are doing. We think of it as individuated, human agencies at work. Then we might get frustrated, tired, burned out, and angry at people, instead of working more consciously attuned with the systems, both external and internal, to also project some of our human modulations onto the environments, rather than just internalising all their modulations indiscriminately.

To rearticulate this: it is not only the technologies and media themselves that change our spatial and temporal relationships. By changing our attunement, approach, and ethics, we also alter the time and space we inhabit.

The technical, material involvement and other artists and phd colleagues

At the level of development, many people have contributed to the aesthetic, technical, and practical formation of the work. As they have done so, conversations have arisen that generated important reflections, all part of the overall contributions to the project. I therefore also decided to make the feedback/documentation systems during technical/material development more rigorous. Here, I systematised specific feedback sessions, note-taking, recordings, and then point-by-point implementation and change that went on during the work. This material was used for further development, as a work tool while communicating with the parties involved, and for the final reflection. I elaborate on the more central dialogue partners in the text to the right.

ETHICS

While this project has expanded to include a wider range of human contributions and to acknowledge more-than-human agencies, it has become clear that ethical considerations are a central part of this development. I would say that ethics have evolved from being an external demand for good research conduct to becoming a central driver of the performative installations themselves.

As laid out earlier in this chapter, it has become paramount to take care of the participants who contribute to the project. The wider web of conversation and co-creation only becomes possible through clear and generous communication, where everyone is informed and included at all levels in the process. Here, I have also taken care to acknowledge contributions through proper crediting, both directly while working together and as a public mention while sharing the research. In addition, I have compensated the contributors financially where this has felt right. Workshop participants, performers, as well as those providing technical and practical assistance, have been paid. While developing the workshops, I have found that a large part of the work for me as a facilitator is to set up an inclusive, safe, calm and inspiring space, that invites the participants to open up and be attentive, so that this immersion into the larger group or environment perspective can happen. This is practical and applied ethical conduct.

As a central driver in the project, ethics elicits a form of attunement that makes one present to and considerate towards every part of the situation. In a sense, the wish to invite an embodied, expanded perspective of the more-than-human is also a wish to invite a form of widening attentiveness and consideration, spreading out to regard more and more invisibilities or blind spots of the larger context. I am noticing that humans, in a Western context at least, somehow think that we need to block out, cut off, neutralise, or negate a lot of aspects to be able to focus in and clearly regard an object of attention. It might just become too complex, confusing, or painful if we don’t. However, this project suggests that it is possible to take on a wider, softer, less logical, and more embodied focus. A focus that is situated and that includes more, without holding it too tightly with the understanding. What one connects through is more of a “heart response”, for lack of a better term.

While trying to articulate this “expanded attunement” as a research approach, it is also becoming clearer to me that such research might not be about extracting delimited knowledge bites from the artwork. Rather, it is about performing with and changing with the artwork in its development. In this way, it is more of a situated, embodied co-reflection that exists in the process and will never be fully covered in later deliberation or documentation.

As previously mentioned, examples of the effects of this attunement can be found in how the more-than-human perspective affected the participants' relations to their contexts, and how the same approach has changed me and my relationship with the environment and technology of which I am part. If taking a perspective that regards all the elements in the work, humans and machines included, one could speculate that all these elements gets more “in tune” with each other. Not without friction, glitches, and stress – but with another type of appreciation of what all these textures are. In that sense, one could say that this ethical relationality changes the spatial and temporal relationships.

ETHICAL CONDUCT TOWARDS

THE SPECULATIVE ARTISTIC FABULATIONS

In line with this approach, I would like to go even further and suggest that, as an artist, it is important to have ethical conduct towards one’s artistic creations. While materialising something aesthetically, it involves being attentive to what arises during the development, so that it can be shaped in a way that allows it to emerge artistically. When the art moves towards a “finished” state, it is also about supporting it to exist as an aesthetic expression with an appropriate relationship to the audience. In terms of this specific project, it is about being committed to letting the speculative fabulations move towards actuality as articulating beings in the world. Additionally, it involves taking care of the contextual and narrative work so that they are met with a certain attentiveness and investment of belief. This might also include ensuring that the larger beings are not physically prodded or pulled too hard, but treated with care, just as I am responsible for ensuring that the audience is taken care of during the interaction.

As an artist working between the imaginative and the actual (fiction and truth), this responsibility towards my creations sometimes takes the form of committing so deeply that I refrain from “explaining” what is actual and what is imaginary, both within the work and in its contextual mediation. This aligns with my relationship with reality, as I do not believe these distinctions are ever clear-cut, but rather intimately intertwined and co-productive. I believe this productive relationship to actuality or truth is also a factor that differentiates my mandate as an artistic researcher from that of an academic researcher. It gives me access to certain experiences and insights about art: the artistic, the artificial, the imaginary, that I can share.

FROM PERSPECTIVES TO MATERIALISATIONS

As I reflect on this ethical aspect of development, I realise that another related movement is that of the transition from a visual-based perspectival approach towards a more haptic and embodied, materialisation-based approach.

Throughout the project, I have explored how the work could invite the audience to change between perspectives, and in this suspension between vantage points, possibly reflecting in new ways. This approach is in direct lineage to how the modernist avant-gardes engaged in interdimensional speculation to critique the classic linear Renaissance perspective, which then led them to all these formal and perspectival innovations in art. In many ways, it has been a great methodological lineage to work with, as it has been a rich way to engage how to address societal invisibilities/impossibility constructions. However, the modernist project was caught in a movement towards abstraction, with its inherent dream of disembodied vantage points, limitless movement, progress, and universality. While wanting to critique the materialism and rationality of their contemporary society, they also somehow absorbed many traits from the epistemological scientific paradigms. The ideal of an exterior objective perspective is one such survivor. Because of my contextual choices, I have also felt these inbuilt ideological mechanisms bearing down on this project as it developed. Here, it has been important to maintain vigilance and keep questioning what is actually at play in the work. “You should be attentive to which utopian abyss you stare into, as it will stare back at you” [4] - or, as Donna Haraway would say, you have to be careful of which stories tell the stories.

I have come to the realisation that for interdimensional speculation to contribute meaningfully to contemporary art, it must embrace the expansion of mediums to formats where viewers can immerse themselves and embody the artwork, while also engaging with its site and context specificity. This approach sidesteps the ideal of objectivity by acknowledging that we are always part of what we reflect on and that there is no outside position to experience from. Donna Haraway makes this critique in her essay "Situated Knowledges," where she reclaims vision as something embodied and specific, mediated by our technological extensions as well as our gendered positions. We are always materially, contextually, physiologically, and sexually situated. [5]

This is why the intermedial installations became more-than-human beings: concrete, site-specific, materially, and agentially embodied hyperspaces. As such, instead of talking about movement between perspectives, it might be better to look at it as movement between materialisations. Materialisations, in the new materialist way that Donna Haraway and Karen Barad approach it, where concepts perform mattering, and material has agency.

The performative installations, as multimedia sites and more-than-human beings, are expanded portraits of Bergen, shifting trans-dimensional materialisations. These installations undergo shifting materialisations through embodied relationships on all levels—from the materials and technologies to human participants and audiences. The expanding perspective is about an expanded way of being, a form, or a materiality. This materiality is shifting and folding, and with it, the audience can also change materiality. It is this shifting and becoming that invites an openness towards not only possibilities of how to see the world but also of how to be the world.

Here, the performative installations can remind us that we too change our materialities as we engage in various co-existences. This transformation might provide us with new insight, a form of knowing that emerges from everywhere, half-hidden.

This shift from perspectives to materialisations is important because it highlights that we are always part of what we reflect on. Thus, there is no reflection that is not expanded, connected, and materially situated. If insight practices (as distinct from knowledge practices) are to offer our world something in the future, it might be what artistic research can contribute to academic and scientific research. This is because artistic research is inherently material, embodied, and situated.

In conclusion, if this artistic research project wishes to propose more novel, and maybe also more ethical, ways of experiencing, reflecting, and relating, it might be via a situated dimensional folding, engaging participatory speculation within the multidimensional as embodied, site-specific, and tactile. Suggesting the possibility of such a situated formalism might be a way to push interdimensional artistic reflection from modernism and make it relevant today.