This project has been curious about how things are moving, how things are interconnected. This entangled orientation has influenced how the project is articulated. As such, the reflection has not focused on delimiting areas but on tracing the movements that occur between them and reflecting on what materialises from this interrelated approach. In turn, media and practices have woven into each other, the contextualisation of the project has moved back and forth from modernism to the contemporary field, and the context itself has folded into becoming the content.

Throughout development, the research has engaged in an ongoing interdimensional folding at the edge of the possible and explored various ways to stretch temporal and spatial lines of enquiry. This has also elicited a movement of the imaginary towards the actual and an ongoing ‘reaching out’ towards the imperceptible, without needing to fully grasp it with understanding.

Overall, this engagement has led to a development with a strange linearity that is not so straightforward to conclude on. The research has felt like a continual return—a development where differentiated aspects slide into each other.

However, in this concluding chapter I will attempt to draw out key aspects of the PhD and propose possible professional contributions to the field of Fine Art and artistic research.

INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION

AND PERFORMATIVE INSTALLATIONS

This project aligns itself with artists who draw inspiration from science and mathematics, as well as those engaged in speculative and imaginative practices. Consequently, it has developed a methodology of INTERDIMENSIONAL ARTISTIC SPECULATION. This approach has been crafted by drawing inspiration from the formal interdimensional movement of modernist avant-garde practices and combining it with Speculative Fabulation derived from literary speculative fiction.

Throughout development, this project has explored how interdimensional artistic speculation could be activated in the expanded media format of PERFORMATIVE INSTALLATIONS and has researched how this could transform the installations into reflective spaces. These speculative movements from actual, perceptible spatial-temporal dimensionality can move toward fewer dimensions, eliciting a form of abstraction and simplification, or toward more expanded dimensions, which elicit various forms of complexity. It is the way the audience experiences being suspended between these positions that carries the potential for reflective openness. Here, the hope has been that this engagement would invite a more flexible, response-able presence in the audience towards what might often be perceived as invisible, beyond perception or cognitive scope.

MORE-THAN-HUMAN BEINGS

A decisive movement in the development has been how this shifting, expanding, and folding of dimensional perspectives and positions has led to the performative installations arising as more-than-human beings. One way to articulate this developmental path is that the exploration of how to fold the performative installations like a hypercube led to the realisation that this could be expressed as folding contexts into each other or into the content. Furthermore, this could also be articulated as working with meta-stories or contextual stories, formally folding and shaping them alongside shaping the installations. In turn, this led to the project arising as agential, articulating contexts, environments, and institutions.

From this, the performative installations have become increasingly interactive as a way to immerse the audiences as participants in this more-than-human perspective or embodiment. This has turned out to be the vehicle for the project to invite a more situated and new-materialist approach to interdimensional movement—an approach that also decentralises the human. The role of the artist has shifted from a central performer to a more supportive role as the moderator, host, or guide. The audience-participants have been invited to adopt a more expanded attentiveness: a caring and open reflective approach that embraces partial knowing. As such, the title of this project could also be 'The Reflective Potential of Artworks as Articulating More-than-Human Beings.'

In short, this contextual, media-expanded focus has moved towards exploring how we engage with our environment. Initially, the focus for the project was to specifically reflect a correlation between the complexities of expanded dimensionalities and digital technology, through the way that the performative installations folded digital and human/biological agencies and movements. However, as the project progressed within this expanded/interconnected premise, this aspect has become part of a broader exploration of the consequences for our physical, biological, digital, and social entanglements. All ways in which context and content, internal and external, mind and body, subject and object, and imaginary and actual have been allowed to move more freely as co-constituent parts of a larger web.

As such, the reflections arising from the performative installations are part of a wider environmental, cybernetic perspective. In fact, the focus of this project might now be articulated as engaging a form of contextual, relational, expanded reflection.

Here, I have found that interdimensional speculation through the performative installations has indeed offered human participants and audiences a way to reflectively and materially explore how they position themselves within the relationships they establish, holding the potential to think differently and move beyond existing worldviews. This, however, is an opportunity, a potential, that might or might not occur for those who engage with the artworks. I will not claim this as a definite outcome of the research, as it belongs to the open potential of the encounter with art. However, as the researcher, I have certainly been reshaped in the transformative experience of artistic research development and found that extra-dimensional speculation can stimulate new reflections on how I am embedded in something beyond my perceptions. It has been rewarding to note in myself, as well as in the agential beings involved in the project, how this ongoing engagement has pushed us towards the edge of the known and towards new relational formations. The engagement has highlighted, and sometimes countered, some mechanisms of negating and othering along the way, eliciting surprising connections and materialisations that are not fully comprehensible to human understanding.

EXPANDED ATTUNEMENT

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 invisibilities or blind spots in the larger context. This 'expanded attunement' is an ethical aspect of the project. In the case of the performative installations themselves, it has been about regarding all elements in the installations—the materials, technologies, speculative fabulations, and humans—as performing agents that take part in the research reflection. While trying to articulate this expanded attunement as a research approach, it has also become clearer that such research might not be about extracting delineated knowledge bites from the artwork. Rather, it is about performing with, changing with, the artwork in its development. In this way, it is more of a situated, embodied co-reflection that exists in the process, arises in the artistic results, and will never be fully covered in later reflection or documentation.

However, this specific example of art that invites a more entangled and expanded way of reflecting, or of being, might be what the project can contribute overall. It feels like something closer to what a technology-positivist, human-centric, Western society needs right now. However, here I touch on the limit of what I believe art can claim without instrumentalising it. So let us leave it at that.

It feels more grounded to muse that an entangled and expanded artistic reflection might be what this artistic research can contribute to the wider research field: that we do not need to fully understand or grasp something to engage with it and gain insights from it; that certain relationships require us to adopt a more humble, open, and imaginative approach; and that ultimately, we humans need to train ourselves to be more comfortable with being lost in complexities, or with being distributed or decentralised as small parts of larger systems. We can actively engage in this way and possibly become a little more insightful about the world.

EXPANDED MEDIA AND DISCIPLINES

Throughout this PhD, I have been inspired by avant-garde strategies to push beyond media boundaries as a way to innovate in art. This project is positioned within this lineage of expanded practices and has constantly combined artistic media and methods to drive development. To underline how fundamental this expanded media position is for the project, I have put extra work into mapping the context of expanded intermedia art. I have also substantiated how I engaged with and further intermingled the already expanded artistic formats of New Media, Installation, and Performance. Here, there could be a case for claiming that the way I specifically develop and activate the area of Performative Installation might be an intermedial contribution of this project that could be taken up as a framework for other artists in the field.

In the reflection, I have also taken extra care to map how the development of interdimensional speculation in modernism, specifically how the Dimensionist movement, led by Charles Tamko Sirato, moved art forms through dimensions, leading to the opening up of media boundaries. Here, I have also mapped how this interlinks with the more conventional historical contextualisation of expanded media formats in art. As such, this PhD reflection might contribute a different historical path of artistic development towards expanded media, or simply enrich the field by highlighting how aesthetic and formal development and interdimensional movement might have cross-pollinated. This project is an example of how this can be a very generative context to dialogue with and an invitation to further artistic, interdimensional study and engagement!

Here, it is also important to note that besides combining media, the project has also engaged with transgressing the disciplinary area of Fine Art altogether, by drawing on methods from literature, theatre, Live Action Role Play, and academic research. While engaging with the wider field of artistic research in Norway and abroad, I have identified that the strategy of pushing beyond the boundaries of one’s field and discipline is a common strategy for development in artistic research. In the case of this project, I would say I align the boundary transgressions of extra-dimensional movement with intermedial and interdisciplinary movements, and situate these as a core aspect of development. As such, this project has contributed to reflecting on how this transgressive cross-pollination might be very fundamental for our field on all levels. Here, I will note that, paradoxically, one might think that post-modernist development has let go of the avant-garde ideal of the new. Inadvertently, it seems to be very much alive and kicking in Fine Art, certainly in this project’s love for movement and change. Through the emerging influence of artistic research, with its requirement for novel contributions, it might also be returning as a stronger ideal for artistic value overall. As positioned within Fine Art, which has a long history of grappling with the consequences of avant-garde transgressions and innovations, I would observe that Fine Art might have something to contribute today, when the wider research field now seeks to connect across disciplines and areas as a way to innovate.

Within the performative installations, the methodological driver of interdimensional artistic speculation might not necessarily have given rise to the development of new media formats, materialities, or technologies in themselves. The Kinect sensor, for example, may appear technologically advanced, yet it is already a discontinued device. Sensor technology has been used in New Media Art for at least 50 years, and a broader understanding of interactivity in art could trace the use of related mechanisms even further back. Where this project might contribute to its field is in how it combines practices and media areas, as exemplified by how the interactivity of digital sensors is set in conversation with the relational interaction of Live Action Role Play in “A Panel Discussion of Another Dimension.” This intersection can be argued to push the area of Fine Art Performance, as well as expand on how interactivity works across New Media and Installation.

The intersection between different media has also given rise to the haptic and sonic 'instrument' of vibrating resonating ropes, which is the core agential media in “Pulling the Earth Strings.” I would claim that even though this engages readily available technologies of visual programming, motors, and transducers, the combination makes for a quite unique haptic/sonic artistic aesthetic—one that can animate the materials in the work and let them 'talk.' I would argue that this has offered the participating audiences a unique form of interdimensional engagement or conversation with the artwork.

The examples above have arisen from the enquiry of how digital technology and text/narrative could be engaged as speculative devices to move the network of actors beyond a perceivable spatial-temporal dimensionality. Here, I think that the development of how this dialectical, narrative layer has been integrated into the various performative installations might be where I truly add something to the areas of New Media, Performance, and Installation.

AN ARTISTIC RESEARCH AESTHETICS

Since the development of this project draws inspiration from methods in science and mathematics, as well as artistic imaginary practices, the formal and aesthetical results have come to balance between being artistic reflection dissemination and being artworks. The movement between a lecture and a storytelling session in “Where Are We Now? Where Are We Now? Where Are We Now?” is one example. The panel discussion as a speculative roleplay session in “The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension” is another, and the performance event as a guided research workshop in “Pulling the Earth Strings” might be yet another. In this way, the project has continuously explored what 'research through artistic methods' might look like and how dissemination of the reflections can take artistic forms. As such, the project might contribute towards how artistic reflection could be mediated through artistic formats. More interestingly, the project might exemplify how artistic research arises in its own formats—unique hybrids of methodologies and aesthetics. Here, the performative installations could inspire the fine art context as well as the development of how one structures research exchange and dissemination in the wider academic research context. For one, the performative installations allow the audience to reflect through textual movements as an embodied, spatial, material experience. This is something that artistic research can contribute to academic research, a field that normally focuses solely on conceptual juggling.

SPECULATIVE FABULATIONS

This also aligns with how Speculative Fabulation has been engaged as a reflective practice throughout development. While mapping the history of artistic extradimensional speculation to make it relevant in a contemporary context, I merged it with the literary method of Speculative Fabulation and thus explored how the speculative could also be dimensional, formal, and embodied. As I engage with interdimensional artistic speculation, it has become clear from the fabulations arising in the project that exploring how fictions and artifices incarnate and operate as performative installations is a central aspect of development. In this way, the project might contribute a specific version of artistic imaginary practice, with transferable methods and approaches that might be useful for other artists and researchers.

While the project continuously engaged in a movement of the imaginative towards the actual and back, I started to feel an ethical responsibility towards the fabulations arising in the project. This responsibility has sometimes taken the form of committing so deeply that I refrain from “explaining” what is fictional and what is true, 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, and the imaginary, that I can share.

I believe that engaging with Speculative Fabulation, as laid out in this PhD project, can invite us to reflect on how we, as humans, create individuation and identity constructions, and how we then invest in and identify with them to become active agents in this world. Throughout this reflection, I have often discussed how we cut and delimit ourselves in relation to the world as an unproductive or potentially harmful mechanism, advocating instead for a more expanded and entangled approach. As such, I could say that essentially this project reflects on the connection between the dissolution of the central perspective and the dissolution of the individual.

However, here I acknowledge the irony in the project proposing to achieve this by proliferating more identity constructions and inviting the audience to invest belief in them to activate their reflective potential. This essentially recognises that the project does not aim to obliterate delimitations, distance, and identity constructions, but rather to explore how they work. By engaging with them through playful interdimensional folding, the project invites an awareness of their constructed nature while being mindful of their effects and contributions. This comprehension might loosen the frameworks a little, making the actuality of them move a bit further towards the imaginary. Maybe the question of something being real or imagined is not so relevant at all. However, the ethical question of our intent with them might be much more important. Are we giving identity constructions space to actuate themselves in the world as propaganda, to be mindlessly consumed and used for programming or indoctrination? Or are we engaging these constructions as a way to open up conversation, nuance, and reflection?

ART AND SCIENCE

Throughout development, I have experienced that there is something in both science and art that gels very well and invites the cross-pollinations and hybridity that artistic research engages. Interdimensional speculative fabulation, as a form of imaginary practice, has been found to stimulate reflections and stretch the mind. However, fabulation is not a science. It does not extrapolate towards finding truths and knowledge; it bends the allegorical and the actual.

The unexpected happens continually in experienced reality and in science itself, even in the science that seeks to know the unfathomable, such as mind/matter and space/time entanglements. Here, the artistic imaginary that speculates in unorthodox or impossible directions might have the potential to offer us glimmers into realities hidden from us by our present set of preconceptions. However, the most important insight that artistic research might offer to research at large is the methodological understanding of how actuality and imagination are co-constitutive. As the artistic research field matures, it will be interesting to see how it holds its ground in relation to academic research and how it will be able to contribute to what society needs. I feel that this could, in fact, happen through cross-pollinating with wider research practices as a way to know them and enrich all parts, yet also through maintaining its own distinctiveness as art. This balancing act is neither simple nor easy. It requires a trickster position that can surf on twisted movements and take on simultaneous dimensional positions.

EXPANDED AGENCY

This might also relate to understanding agency within artistic development. As this project has progressed, I have developed an increasing sense of the work doing what it does, as dictated by the movements already inherent in the media, methods, and histories. The research can be articulated in various ways, through interdimensional speculation or the history of expanded media art, but it performs the same regardless. In any case, the development has led to a decentralised human subject, to entangled materialisations, and to an immersive positioning that inadvertently critiques disembodied objectivity. All this arises while I sometimes feel like a mere observer of the development. In turn, this has led to an interesting decentralisation of my position as an artistic researcher, where I view my own agency very differently and question how much is coming from me in instigating the art and how much the art arises of its own accord. I find this position generative, this ongoing curious conversation with the artwork, while being attentive to what it tells me through its materialisations.

A SITUATED FORMALISM

Finally, this might also reflect the consequences of how contemporary art engages with the interdimensional and extradimensional as relevant sizes. Are we engaging with mere models, tools for reflection, or dynamics of the intricate, moving web of material/immaterial reality? Here, the developmental practice of opening towards the expanded and entangled utterances of the more-than-human, and engaging belief in the Speculative Fabulations, has influenced how I see the potential for more contemporary interdimensional speculation. Throughout, the project has engaged with and challenged the method of a visually based, perspectives-oriented approach in modernist interdimensionality. One that aligns quite directly with how avant-garde artists formally engaged with the fourth spatial dimension, leading them to abstraction, cubism, and suprematism with their inherent dreams of disembodied vantage points and limitless movement, progress, and universality—artistic ideals that were also shared with the science and mathematics of their day. However, being attentive to the arising artistic outcomes of this project has led to the realisation that if a contemporary artistic practice wishes to move beyond this inherent epistemology—towards novel and possibly more ethical ways of experiencing, reflecting, and relating—it might be through a more situated dimensional folding, engaging participatory speculation within the multidimensional as embodied, site-specific, and tactile. In sum, suggesting the possibility of an incarnated and situated formalism might be a way to push interdimensional artistic reflection beyond modernism and make it relevant today.