1st Edition
The Art of Experiment Post-pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st Century Architecture and Design
A handbook for navigating our troubled and precarious times intended to help readers imagine and make their world anew.
In search of new knowledge practices that can help us make the world livable again, this book takes the reader on a journey across time—from the deep past to the unfolding future. The authors search beyond human knowledge to establish negotiated partnerships with forms of knowledge within the planet itself, examining how we have manipulated these historically through an anthropocentric focus. The book explores the many different kinds of knowledge, and the diversity of instruments needed to invoke and actuate the potency of human and nonhuman agencies. Four key phases in our ways of knowing are identified: material, strengthening, reconfiguring and extending, which are exemplified through case studies that take the form of worlding experiments.
This pioneering work will inspire architects, artists and designers as well as students, teachers and researchers across arts and design disciplines.
- Introduction
- Acknowledgement
- Overview
- Material Knowledge
- Primordial
- The first civilisation
- Strengthening Knowledge
- Origin of Human Thought
- Communities of thinking
- Development of Modern Science
- Reconfiguring Knowledge
- Beyond giving an account: the dark continents of research
- Epistemology and subjectivity
- The formation of artistic research
- The description problem in artistic research
- The concept of exposition in artistic research
- The challenge of evaluating "unconventional" research outcomes
- Epistemic plurality
- Transverse epistemologies
- Epistemic partiality
- Extending Knowledge
- Organa Paradoxa
- Nonhuman dimensions
- Worlding Experiments
- Worlding Case Studies
Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes
Rachel Armstrong
Big Bang origin of universe
Everything is entangled
Strangeness of the mind
Where does agency reside?
Origin of planet Earth
Biogenesis
First Great Enfolding
A new kind of extinction
Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes
Origin of Humans
Origin of Thought and Language
Early Origins of Formal Knowledge
Rolf Hughes
Rachel Armstrong
Sym-practices
Sym-biosis
Sym-biogenesis
Sym-poiesis
Sym-pathy
An Ethics of Care
Worlding as an Entangled Practice
Vulnerability
Imagination
Familiarity
Empathy
Care
Provocation
Repetition
Non-innocent Perspectives
Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes
6.1 Performance
Creature Box
The Capsule of Crossed Destinies
Trace Hall
6.2 Artefacts
Brick Dialogues
Caustic Ophelia
Cracked Hermione
Living Architecture
Exploring Interfaces
Synthetic Ethics
Expressing Outcomes
Monstering: A Transdisciplinary Method for an Unstable World
The Temptations of the Nonlinear Ladder
Making Monsters
Monsters in Utopia
Learning from Landscape: Forging Folklore, Tallinn Tales
From Victoria Tunnel to Quantum Tunnelling
Wicked Home: Sacred Spaces
- Towards an Ecological Era of Knowledge Exchange
7. Conclusion
Rachel Armstrong and Rolf Hughes
- A new kind of knowledge: Organa Paradoxa
- Change-making
- Activating Knowledge
Developing appropriate toolsets
Establishing new figures for thinking through
Reconfiguring power relations
Expanding the nature of experiment
8. Epilogue
Rolf Hughes
8.1 An Art of Unfolding
Index
Biography
Rolf Hughes is professor in the epistemology of design-driven research at the Department of Architecture, KU Leuven, and director of artistic research for the Experimental Architecture Group. An interdisciplinary artist and performer, his writing spans creative and critical genres.
Rachel Armstrong is professor of experimental architecture at Newcastle University and visiting professor at KU Leuven. She pioneers the interdisciplinary field of "living architecture," which engages the material and technological potency of life within spatial agendas.
