°

°

from

Foaming Exercises

to scenarios of coexistences

                                                                                                  °
° °

foam on plexiglass

°

°

FROM FOAMING EXERCISES TO SCENARIOS OF COEXISTENCES,

anticipating emancipatory spatial practices

°

INTRODUCTION

The structure and dynamics 
of worldly spaces are neighborhoodly. 
In them different kinds of life forms are connected in 
a sharing relation, in coexistence. Any position from close, loving and intimate 
to distant, aggressive or forced, from solidarity to imprisonment is detached to and depicted 
through spatial relations. The other facet of coexistence is co-isolation and a state of shared 
closure. In the light of the very recent moments of now, the latter has become very 
familiar to us. It has become apparent that when smooth coexistence becomes 
fractured, the side emphasizing exactly co-isolation and closure become 
perceptible with a new kind of force. A close to total global 
co-isolation through and through has taken place, 
and what a moment ago was perceived as 
"a normal" has been displaced with 
a temporally permanent state of 
exception. The question 
“Is your virus protection 
up to date” has 
taken on a 
more real 
tone. 

                Originally inspired by Peter Sloterdijk’s 
                “interpretation of foams” in the final volume of 
his SPHERES trilogy, the exposition 
suggests a vision to reality/realities 
guided by engaging with the 
material/materiality of 
the inquiry. 


                The research is not only conducted 
              with and through the bubbly material in question 
           but begins of foam and from thereon focuses on foam-like spatial coexistences. 
             I propose speculative means for linking the notion of coexistence 
                with practices of foam-like spatial, conceptual 
                         and onto-ethical considerations.

                                Since late 2018 I have taken 
                        FOAM ARCHITECTURE onto a surgical table 
                      to look at its spatial, material, metaphorical and 
                     conceptual implications in several artistic 
                     research events and settings. I have 
                     realized a series of inquiries on 
                        co-joined spatiality characterized 
                          by the “ontological nervousness 
                               of the coexistent, 
                                   the other, 
                                       the outer”.
                                            (Sloterdijk 2016, 14.)

              The main stage of inquiry is the FOAMING EXERCISES 
              installation, which was part of the six research cells, brought 
              together to the Research Pavilion #3 (RP #3) under the title 
           theme “Ecologies of research”. 
        The exposition deals with 
     foam-like spatialisation in 
  relation to material-based research, fictionalising and 
    emancipatory spatial practices
     – the latter presented here as one of the outcomes of the Foaming Exercises installation
                                 in RP #3, and as such it is an opening to an ongoing further examination. 
                                     The installation is presented in more detail in the 
                                             FOAMING EXERCISES exposition 

°

° v i s i t °p r o j e c t l o g °

°

°

°

experiment, spring 2019

°

°

BUBBLES,

polyspherology, materiality, fictioning, towards emancipation

Foaming Exercises installation was both factual and fictional spacing for experimenting with parameters and simulations of foam-like coexistence. In the space of the installation, foam was a giver and a participator of the research, in asking what kinds of conceptual, metaphorical and imaginary pathways and outcomes material-based speculation facilitates.

INTO SPHERES. To set the scene, I introduce a few notions and referential points that have influenced the formation of foaming exercises. In which ways do the (Foams-inspired) notions of “spherical theory”, “polysphericality” and “simultaneously immune and affected co-dependency” might relate to the exercises and their outcomes?

AGENT FOAM. Through introducing Foaming Exercises sessions, I discuss how confidence to material can alter the ways in which we understand coexistence, co-presence and neighbourhoodly practices – tactile and imaginary.

FOAMING FICTION. In relation to the research cell AIRA/Artistic Intelligence Research Alternator, which Foaming Exercises was (one of five) part of, I discuss how foaming project is linked to AIRA’s ground theme of “new fiction” and the jointly agreed commitment to “taking other worlds as (AIRA’s) starting point”.

FOAMING FURTHER. In conclusion I sketch a gateway – emerging from the experiments in RP #3 – for further examination of spatial coexistence in relation to emancipatory practices of (urban) space, in the light of Jacques Rancière’s writings on practices of equality, and an approach to the common world in terms of coexistence and exclusion. The currently ongoing study aims to examine how can enhancement of emancipation of space and spatial practices be viewed on the grounds of foam-space speculations.

°

°

°

series of foam on glass

°

°

°

INTO SPHERES,

from plural spherology to sketching with foam

Understanding the world as a non-round entity defining our time and world-view, lays a terrain for the inspection of polyspherical spatiality by Sloterdijk, author of the Spheres trilogy, the final part of which is Foams. As backdrop lies the idea of understanding nineteenth and twentieth centuries as epitomes of the collapse of monological metaphysics based on conception of one united sphere, and parallelly the Death of god. It is noteworthy to mention that Sloterdijk’s trilogy commits to interpreting Western metaphysics as a distinctively spatial and immunological project. Each volume looks at the theme of “sphere” from different angles. The dramaturgy runs from the discovery of a singular self (modelled through the notion of bubble and the most intimate spaces such as womb, relationship between lovers, between God and human subject), to exploration of permeable world (globe), to an all-encompassing notion of plurality (foam). The final volume Foams, phenomenology of spatial plurality deals with the contemporary decentralized network of social and cultural spheres in which the conception of self-structuring totality (such as myth, religion, enlightenment) has collapsed.

Throughout the spherical theory Sloterdijk builds a meta narrative of human history outlined as a constellation of various systems of collective, co-joined spaces. On the other hand this meta-sphere entails systems and habitations of contamination and immunology, in all imaginable scales – from the fetal period of being-in-womb to apartment blocks and skyscrapers (“spatial immune systems” and “dwelling machines”) to villages, nations, maps, to air conditioning to islands to space travel to religious systems, to the world and the cosmos. The whole of the 2500-page trilogy builds on a common conception that we live in interconnected fractures. Spatial plurality is ruminated in terms of connectedness and cohabitation, where not only persons but also “things and circumstances are affected in their respective ways according to a principle of neighborhood”. ^[1]

The view is in principle in line with that of the noted thinker of community, Jean-Luc Nancy, who states that being first and foremost implies to being-with-one-another. The claim marks a fundamental coexistence, with no exception. ^[2] However, as Nancy points out, coexistence is not to be reduced to a “constitution of being many”, but instead implies to a more complex ontological setting; “it is a notion whose tone often oscillates between indifference and resignation, or even between cohabitation and contamination”. ^[3] Sloterdijk, too, promotes a borderline space or opening between individualism and collectivism. They both pursue a view where bubbly singularity and foamy plurality are two sides of the same coin. ^[4]

It is noteworthy to mention that I am aware of certain critical points in Sloterdijk’s epic outlook, indeed a very Western overlook, which comes into being questioned as the trilogy seems to promise to cover all scales from womb to the end of universe. Instead of an ontological project, Spheres trilogy can be seen as a large staging of concepts, ideas and scenarios realised in a colorfully interdisciplinary approach. Sloterdijk seems aware that thinking outside the box (or, the liberal individualist paradigm at an ontological level) is risky. He presents his work as continuation and an improved version to Heidegger’s Being and Time. He claims Heidegger’s mistake was to seek answers to “who”, as Sloterdijk puts his effort to something that should need to be asked earlier, namely, the question of “where”. Spheres is a phenomenological project, and it seems to redeem its task in that sense that it provokes, or, arouses us to see things as if for the first time. Nevertheless there is certain quite problematic in Sloterdijk’s pathos in the first volume, Bubbles, where he (a man) writes about “womb-immanence of all being”.

It is also at least questionable how especially the two first volumes (Bubbles and Globes) have, in parts, an almost seismic undertone of a “threatening outside”, as Sloterdijk has just claimed that the purpose of his project is to unhinge the dualistic conceptions and pursue plurispatial borderline conceptions without any clear either-or stances. ^[5]

These remarks were to remain marginal side notes in the contexts of this exposition. And yet they proved NOT, but quite the opposite, as I will discuss later in the FOAMING FICTION section.

°

°

°

Sloterdijk’s spherological phenomenology starts and ends within human experience, while expands to include sensabilities and intuitions. The mentioned aspects are affiliated with co-joined spatial systems, which are singular and differentiated at the same time. Experientiality – proceeding by paying attention to (phenomenological) first-person perspective in the experiments – and trusting in materiality were obvious means to proceed with the study.

From day one it was crystal clear that the foam project would and should be playful, and include fictional dimensions in imagining and realizing foamy spaces and activities. Starting from the level of addressing the conditions of research in an academic grant application format as in “Investigating a Phenomenology of Foam. Needing to buy grand amounts of dishwashing detergent (preferably with organic composition). Needing to invest in a large aquarium and a powerful soap bubble blower”, something told me that there would be a proper amount of desired lightness to counterbalance the density and play of scale (between factual and fictional) in relation to the textual references.

How, then, would foaming exercises – if in any way – respond to what I took as an imaginary quest by the author (Sloterdijk), advocated already in his Critique of Cynical Reason written in 1983 where “a return to attitudes less worldly, less knowing, less trapped by the conceptual snares we have laid for ourselves” is suggested? ^[6]

The connection between material-based inquiry and a phenomenology of co-joined spatiality (advocated in more depth in the later work by the author of _Spheres _trilogy) comes with an obvious parallel to the premises of artistic research, insofar as artworks can be articulated as “epistemic things” that have not yet been understood or known. ^[7] Artistic research, too, is a constellation of known and unknown materialities, concepts, definitions, signifiers and experientialities, all of which are in some ways co-joined like parts within an immunology system. You touch one particle and the whole constellation is affected, shaken, altered.

In a similar vein as Bruno Latour talks about the “parliament of things”, Sloterdijk makes use of the metaphor of foam to discuss the “republic of spaces”. ^[8] Societies are described, similarly, in terms of “aggregates of microspheres where couples, households and other associations border one another, just like individual bubbles in a mountain of foam” that are neither directly accessible nor completely separable. ^[9] A principle of co-isolation and simultaneous co-fragility applies as well. In foam, individual bubbles are never in direct communication or communion but always in a partial and selective relationship with one another.

°

°

°

AGENT FOAM,

assemblages of simultaneous stages

                            The centerpiece 
                         of foaming installation 
                       is a large aquarium, which 
                    I fill one-fifth full of both tub and 
                 canal water, adding approximately one 
             liter of dishwashing detergent. To make the foam grow 
       I use compressed air and blow air into the tank at the beginning 
                   of day and leave the foam peter out in its own time. When 
                   blown it up to the maximum, 
                        when foam fills the aquarium 
                        so that it runeth over, 
                             the bubbles take 
                          almost perfectly round shapes, 
          which immediately, after leaving them be, 
     start changing their shape into non-round – first oval, 
     then angular spacy beings. 
                            The silky-thin borderline 
                                     or seam 
                                     between 
                                 the individual
                               bubbles transforms 
              as they change their shape… 
              some lonely ones crack dead… 
                   the bubbles are never detached but maintain their connectedness. 
The foam that forms as tens and hundreds, as thousands of co-joined bubble-units 
become a creature, that, being in connection to the surrounding and internal air, 
seems to constantly rearrange its form as an organism. 
               A stage for foaming exercises is set.

°

° v i s i t ° p r o j e c t l o g °

°

°

°

°

°

In its intentional insistent in foam-ness, the study follows the stance of feminist materialism and the premise where the relation between mind and matter is highlighted and the interaction between these is emphasized. ^[10] The material experiments became the primary epistemology of the research. Foaming sessions served both as contemplative scene for thinking through materiality, and the conceptual, concrete, and imaginary scenarios effected by foam.

As part of the RP #3 Discursive events program, together with my collaborator in the Venice phase, scenographer-media artist and a doctoral researcher Paul Cegys, we arranged several exercise sessions by the foam: the audience was invited to take a seat around a round table on which a large rectangular aquarium was placed. The audience was able to be in a close contact by the aquarium, so that they could form almost an intimate connection with the foam. At the same time, the audience could be in contact with other audience members by seeing each other through the glass of the aquarium.

I did not want to attach beforehand the foaming sessions specifically to certain context such as architecture, geographies, topologies or mapping techniques of foam, or aimfully lead them to any other bio-scientific, historical or mythological direction. We simply took some fifteen to twenty minutes sessions of reading fragments from Sloterdijk’s Foams edition. Spending time by the foam aquarium provided meditative contemplation by the material, listening to fragments of the foam-insistent source material.

°

°

installation in-construction, paul testing vr foaming

°

°

°

The installation assemblage consisted of four simultaneous elements:

(1) foam aquarium on a large round table. The size of the aquarium is 160 x 55 centimeters, height is 60 centimeters. The round table is 180 centimeters in circumference, and for the audience 10 portable stools were placed around the table.

(2) mediated immersion setting. A looping foam-close-up video on screen, and an in-the-foam VR simulation with Oculus Rift virtual head set. Realized in collaboration with Paul Cegys. From our joint pre-Venice preparatory sessions of filming and photographing the material experiments with 360-camera (GoPro and Fly360) and a still camera, Paul edited a footage that was screened looping on a large (48”) flat screen, placed on the space around the centerpiece roundtable. In the pavilion opening week, some of the foaming sessions included audience try-outs with Oculus Rift headset – “to experience a mediated moment of immersion, an adaptation of being-in-the-foam”.

(3) anatomy of foams collection; samples of different foams at-hands, mimicking archaeologist’s or geologist’s compilation of samples. A display a small anatomy of foam: foam born in the chemical reaction in adding drops of water on an effervescent tablet, some espresso remains and saliva in a few showcases or glass-bell-jars in the space of the installation.

(4) vertical archive as a documentation of foaming exercises (reading sessions, discussions, tests, observations, notebook entries); an archive including notes and manual files on the wall, in a “vertical system order”, along a timeline (slices of note paper pinned next to one another in a Western order, from left to right). On the same archive wall, I started to draw a family tree where I marked different areas of interest (foam in architecture, foam in mythologies, biological foam, topologies of foam, foam beliefs, and so on) and notes taken in the sessions with audience participation.

°

°

installation photos © Haupt & Binder, universes.art

°

°

°

The audience were free to familiarize themselves with the installation before, after, or during the reading session. After each reading session we had discussions inviting the audience to reflect freely, and asked also questions listed beforehand. One of the most common immediate responses concerned the intensity of the session – “the intensity of being so close by the foam allows to shut out outside voices and noises, and enables a luxury to just meditate by the foam”. The responses from the audience touched among others the issues of “how to stage artistic research” (also “how to communicate” and “how to present”), as well as the significance of “being able to be in a close, durational contact with the material”.

Grabbing two of the issues raised – meditating by foam and intimacy with the material: both perceptions highlight the agency of material in a way where the actual material guides not only the contextualization and orientation of the research experiment, but it (foam) becomes equally relevant a component of research as any written or artistic point of reference. Leaning on conceptions in New Materialism and object-oriented ontology we have learned that “materials, practices and things speak to us”. ^[11] Yet on a further note, Esa Kirkkopelto aptly argues, that from the perspective of artistic research, even though things and materials speak to us, we can not always necessarily understand what they are saying to us, let alone translate them into discursive language. ^[12] Nevertheless, material (foam) redeems an agency in a way that echoes the conception of ontological multiplicity, where “reality is not one thing, nor is it given, but it is constructed, staged, and performed and contingent on how humans and non-human actions interact.” ^[13]

We can safely say that foam was given – or “it took” – an agency that was confirmed through the intensified setting in an equally undefined interaction with the audience participants. The experiment proved meaningful in terms of acknowledging material as an active element elemental in the process. In yet other words, foam (as well as the way of setting the aquarium, the soap used, the water carried in from the canal etc.) proved as significant a partaker, and as such a reference, as any written or artistic reference.

Intimacy becomes one of the objects of thought in relation to coexistence. The foam aquarium was placed like a camping fire in the middle of the participants to be able to stare on not fire but foam in its constant slow transition. The situation is easily intimate in relation to the other gatherers but also in terms of the dedicated relation with the object of observation, foam. Physical nearness of people, things and substances… special lighting carefully highlighting the vividly transforming bursting moving alchemic-like bubbly process… sense of shared experience… the other installation components resonating on the same stage yet in the periphery of the participants’ perception – all these elements were to emphasize the intimacy and sharedness of the camp fire situation. Being exposed to participating in a shared intimate space comes close to a personal relationship. Along with being exposed to a shared intimacy comes vulnerability, and the recognition of the presence of “anything can happen”. Being exposed to an organized setting of shared intimacy involves a being exposed to remain in an unarmed position, thus certain level of confidence and trust is required.

°

° v i s i t ° p r o j e c t l o g ° °

°

°

FOAMING FICTION,

inquiries on new fiction

                 To make inquiries, 
              develop scenarios and 
            test techniques of fictionalizing 
         through and with foam. It is a material 
     and discursive space in which foam has a leading 
         role as material substance, 
                spatial structure 
                          and 
          metaphorical field of exploration. 
It is calm, light, pure and neutral, and at the
     same time it is all over the place, 
sticky,   dying,   tragic,   perverse and loaded like dynamite at the same time 
– which I like very much. 
                    It is just soap and water but it is everything and anything, 
                    too.

As mentioned earlier, Foaming Exercises installation was part of AIRA Artistic Intelligence Research Alternator, one of the six research cells of RP #3. AIRA consisted of five initiatives by five artist-researchers focusing on parallel realities by taking other worlds as their starting point for a collective inquiry into different modalities and materializations in our perception of reality. ^[14]

AIRA’s conceptual framing was based on an observation: a new form of narrating, which can be called New Fictiveness has emerged, with a new understanding of fiction and its intertwinement with fact. This conception is particularly relevant in the context of artistic research where new imaginaries augment the world we inhabit.

°

°

°

°

°

°

One of the early references for my foams study, Sebastian Brandt’s The Ship of Fools (Narrenschiff), made at a certain point of the process a radical re-entry. Originally the role of Narrenschiff was to set a certain surreal-absurd-poetic veil over the study – quite important gesture for myself to begin with, a habitual one. too Relatedly, I have a specific call for experimental methods, of which I had a chance to realize Oulipo-inspired performative presentation (with colleagues Ikonen & Momcilovic) in the context of RP #3 Discursive program series Convocation: Expanded language practices. ^[15]

°

THE SHIP OF FOOLS (NARRENSCHIFF)
 
      I BELIEVE IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY
TO MAINTAIN A SECRET AGENDA,
TO WORK WITHIN THE OPERATION 
         OF SUBTERFUGE AND MISDIRECTION.
         WHAT IF WE COULD ORGANIZE AROUND 
THOSE WHO WERE HEREDICS, REBELS, 
    DISSIDENTS, ATHEISTS, ORPHANS, AND NOMADS? 
    WHAT WOULD THE PROPOSAL OF ART LOOK LIKE?          

Brandt Sebastian. The Ship of Fools, trans. Alexander
Barclay. Edinburgh: William Paterson 1876, 8. (Kessinger Publishing’s 
Legacy Reprint of Brandt’s book)
                      

                            °           °     °  °

°

° v i s i t ° p r o j e c t l o g °

°

°

As noted earlier, material orientation guided the research process and the formation of questions in a way where all elements of the research were taken as equally important. This approach proved fruitful in terms of openness to improvise and be playful with different components. I noted how being immersed in the material – not only soap and water but equally the foamy and bubbly concepts and conceptualizations began to slip into my way of thinking and perceiving the phenomena and things around me.

   How about language and words used in this context? 
    Will they start to act like bubbles? 
                       Am I playing with 
                      “just” a metaphor? 

So I dwelled in the foaming-all-over process – read the reference texts, studied architectural structures, space travel images and diaries, air conditioning systems and contamination analyses (lately we have become painfully even more aware what this can mean), tested with materials, dosages of ingredients into liquids, means and intensities of blowing bubbles, making and collecting foams in different scales and formations – and reflected upon how my sensory surface became foamier by each step.

I can safely say that the perception of texts emulated the way how I perceived space and architecture, as indeed foamy constellations. Accordingly, as I read texts – not just foam-related – they strongly resonated in to the spatial experiences and scenarios imagined in relation to foaminess.

I now return to the “problem with the author”, discussed earlier in the INTO SPHERES section: it was exactly the friction with spherology and the critical points addressed, which caused a shift of perspective in my approach with this particular textual material: the sky-high-epic New-Spherical-theory-approach turned my sincere interest into a mode of approaching this particular theoretical composition as experimental material. It was not just about approaching Spheres trilogy as speculative material (which always anyhow is the case) but I decided to relate to it in the axis of realesque fiction, and fictionesque real.

The dynamic borderline between parallel realities and the notion of new fiction were exactly at the core of AIRA Artistic Intelligence Research Alternator research cell, which Foaming Exercises is part of. Therefore, while spending time with Foams readings, I decided to take seriously the possibility that the body of Sloterdijk’s plyspherical study, presented in a “perfect disguise” (my interpretation) of a properly academic spherical theory, is principally bound to be partly credible, partly in-credible, perhaps full-scale fiction to an extent.

Spheres texts began to tickle my imagination in a very specific and haunting way after I chose to handle them with admittedly playful and suspicious mind. Simply put: I started to handle Sloterdijk’s trilogy as one of the (fictional) materials that have tangential points with different kinds of realities.

The 

path

follows

the perfectly

logical approach

of children’s play 

where

THIS someone would pretend to be THAT someone who would do THIS or THAT something.

°

Other than as the material antenna, I approached foam both as a noun (foam) and as a verb (foam-ing). As a noun, foam refers to the formation of spaces in similar way as a large group of bubbles that group together. Or a collection of islands, the frothy remains of espresso in a cup, saliva, or bacterial flora. As a verb foam-ing suggests towards a conception of “foaming as practice”. Foaming also suggests a temporal aspect, towards something being in trans-formation. Retelling Henk Borgdorff’s formulation, foam here functions as – rather than an object of research – an entity in which, and through which the research takes place, and in in which or through which our understanding can evolve. ^[16]

What role, then, did fiction and fictionalizing play in the context of Foaming Exercises, the installation and the discursive events around it? Even though in the context of AIRA, fiction was not approached as opposite to “facts” or “real”, it felt that these polarized positionings needed to be somehow screened. What then, in relation to fictionality, might have been “real” in this setting? Through the foam experiments I aimed at certain “artistic real” (with this particular material-based set of inquiries) which, according to Borgdorff, may in some sense be more real that any other daily reality. ^[17]

As an imaginary practice art has infinite fictionalizing means at hands. Art and artistic practice are always real, while at the same time what is under way is a transformation of this “something real” into what it could be. ^[18] Theorist of experimental systems Hans-Jörg Rheinberger states that the dynamics of art and artistic research, just like in scientific research, lies in the two-fold relation of revelation and constitution. He calls artistic practices, situations and events “epistemic things” constituent in artistic research; “like experimental systems, (they) are vehicles for materializing questions”. ^[19] Rheinberger claims that an “epistemic thing” is to scientific activity what a “statue” is to the art of sculpture. ^[20] What follows is that artistic research articulates the “artistic real” as engendered by artistic practice.

°

°

°

°

°

°

°

FOAMING FURTHER,

towards emancipatory practices of space

Foaming Exercises in RP #3 formed as ground study in an endeavour still in-process. It started with aim to create fictional scenarios of spaces organised according to the “attributes of foam”; it is made of variable shapes and sizes, it lacks a clear centre, it is both fragile and interconnected in its fragility, and it is part of a process of creation.^[21] These elements can be seen as fundamental parts of a further inquiry where things and ideas with no solid ground – such as dreams – are seen worthy of being taken insistently seriously.

 What has grown increasingly meaningful 
 insofar as where the process is today, is a certain 
 solidarity principle, advocated through the notion of coexistence. 
Latour notes that contrary to modernist or anti-modernist philosophies of history, 
which are “always considering only one narrative – that of progress, or the failure of progress 
– Sloterdijk (in Spheres) shows how narratives of both emancipation and 
attachment belong to the one and same story”. He gives an example 
of what is it like to be in the world in the orbit of opposite 
yet simultaneous effects:

            (--) the cosmonaut is emancipated from gravity because s/he never lives 
              one fraction of a second outside of his or her life supports. 
                 To be emancipated and to be attached are 
                     two incarnations of the same event (--)
                         (Latour 2011, 158) 

The bubbly installation set a starting point for a further body of research, which aims at enlarging and concretizing the understanding, role and potential of spatial practices in urban context, focusing on emancipatory practices in making and maintaining space. Urban space is created in a multitude of polemical coexisting relationships. It is inhabited by a wide range of actors, interests and goals, characterized by exchange, production and transition. It consists of multiple much governed spaces saturated with rules, structures and practices that govern them. At the same time, it is also an open space of being – space of imagination, poetry, lingering and dreaming. How to dream of a city where diversity and coexistence prevails?

Jacques Rancière’s thoughts on subject’s capacity to occupy the “common world in terms of coexistence and exclusion" opens a way for drafting a follow-up bubble for further speculations in emancipatory spatial practices. His conception of the distribution of the sensible opens a way to acknowledge the various relationships between being, seeing, thinking and doing; “(distribution of the sensible) defines at once a common world and the way in which these/those subjects take part in it.” ^[22]

In the context of spatial practices that form and shape our living environment the question is:

Can we learn from the examinations of spatial coexistence in ways that help enhancing emancipatory spatial practices? How to unlearn habitual space-making practices in the light of foam-space speculations? Perhaps it is time to take a serious turn towards fiction.

"Fiction is not an invention of an imaginary world, but a construction of 
a framework within which subjects, things, and situations can be perceived 
as coexisting and linked in ways that makes sense." 
He encourages us to think through the moment of present: 
"Narratives of time tell at once what the tendency of time 
makes possible and to what extent those who live in it 
are able to seize hold of the possible. 
This articulation between 
possibility and capacity
is the fiction that is 
at the core of any 
distribution of 
the sensible."
(Rancière 
2017, 
12–13)

°

°

°

°

°

°

°

°

°

°

°

°

°

REFERENCES

Baldwin, Andrew and Bettini, Giovanni 2017. Life Adrift. Climate Change, Migration, Critique. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Barad, Karen 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Barret, Estelle and Bolt, Barbara (eds.) 2013. Carnal Knowledge. Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.

Borgdorff, Henk; Peters, Peter; Pinch, Trevor (eds.) 2020. Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies. New York and Abingdon, Ox: Taylor & Francis / Routledge.

Borgdorff, Henk 2012. The Conflict of the Faculties: perspectives on artistic research and academia. Leiden University Press.

–2013. “Artistic Practices and Epistemic Things in Experimental Systems.”, in Future Knowledge in Artistic Research. Ed. Michael Schwab. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Cobussen, Marcel and Nielsen, Nanette 2012. Music and Ethics. London and New York: Routledge.

Elden, Stuart 2012. “Worlds, Engagaments, Temperaments.” In Sloterdijk Now. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, pp. 1–16.

Jongen, Marc 2011. “On Anthropospheres and Aphrogrammes. Peter Sloterdijk’s Thought Images of the Monstrous.” Humana.Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies, Issue 18 September, pp. 199–219.

Kirkkopelto, Esa 2020. “From quasi-objects to artistic components: Science Studies and Artistic Research”, in Borgdorff, Peters and Inch (eds). Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies. New York and Abingdon, Ox: Taylor & Francis / Routledge, pp. 31–45.

Latour, Bruno 2011. “A Cautious Prometheus?” In Medias Res. Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Poetics of Being. Edited by Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 151–165.

Mickey, Sam 2016. Coexistentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency. Maryland: Lexington Books.

Nancy, Jean-Luc 2000. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne. Stanford California: Stanford University Press.

Rancière, Jacques 2017. Modern Times. Published within the Aesthetic Education Expanded project by Multimedjani institut and Edicija Jugoslavija.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 2006. An Epistemology of the Concrete. Twentieth-Century Histories of Life. Durham and London: The Duke University Press.

Sloterdijk, Peter 2016. Spheres: Plural Spherology, Vol III: Foams, trans. Wielan Hoban. Los Angeles CA: Semiotext(e)

–2014. Spheres: Macrospherology, Vol. II: Globes, trans. W. Hoban. Los Angeles CA: Semiotext(e)

–2011. Spheres: Microspherology, Vol. I: Bubbles, trans. W. Hoban. Los Angeles CA: Semiotext(e).

AIRA and Foaming Exercises in _Universes in Universe online journal’s report of Research Pavilion #3 https://universes.art/en/venice-biennale/2019/research/aira-1