The work of the audience: visual matrix methodology in museums

Visual matrix methodology has been designed for researching cultural imaginaries. It is an image-led, group-based method that creates a “third space” research setting to observe audience groups re-enacting lived experience of an event or process that takes place in the third space of a cultural setting. In this article the method is described through its use in relation to an art-science exhibition, Human + Future of the species, where three audience groups with investments in technology worked with exhibition material to achieve a complex, ambivalent state of mind regarding technological futures. The visual matrix has been designed to capture the affective and aesthetic quality of audience engagement in third space by showing what audiences do with what is presented to them. We argue that such methodologies are useful for museums as they grapple with their role as sites where citizens not only engage in dialogue with one another but actively re-work their imaginaries of the future

The Visual Matrix method in a study of death and dying: Methodological reflections

The Visual Matrix method is designed to elicit imagistic and associative contributions established collectively amongst participants in a group setting. In this article, a hard to-reach area of experience - death and dying - illustrates the production of shared cultural images beyond individual experience. Our dual purpose was to assess the suitability of the method for this challenging topic, and to understand the ways in which death figured in the imagination of the participants. Three theorists, Wilfred Bion, Alfred Lorenzer and Gilles Deleuze, enable us to theorise psychosocial processes of symbolisation beyond cognition

Special issue on Alfred Lorenzer: Introduction

Alfred Lorenzer, a major figure in post-World War II German intellectual debate, is little known in the Anglophone world. As well as supplying biographical details, this short introduction to the special issue on Lorenzer’s work sketches the nature of his debt to Frankfurt School critical theory, highlights his attempt to place psychoanalysis on a materialist footing, and provides an overview of the issue’s contents

Alfred Lorenzer and the depth-hermeneutic method

This extended article aims to introduce an Anglophone audience to the work of Alfred Lorenzer. As such, it has three main components: it outlines some of Lorenzer's central concepts (the scenic, interaction forms, engrams, symbolisation and desymoblisation, language games and scenic understanding); explores the dialectical relations through which, for Lorenzer, unconscious, bodily and social processes are mutually constituted; and sketches some of the principles informing the depth-hermeneutic method, the tradition of social, cultural and social psychological research to which his ideas gave rise. Throughout, Lorenzer is viewed as seeking to put psychoanalysis on a materialist footing and concerned to assert its critical potential