Articulating thresholds ~ artistic techniques for more-than-human sensitivities

Abstract

This practice-based research proposes thresholding techniques as a contribution to processual artistic practices. It argues that such practices engage matter not as readymade form, but as a flux of creative becomings, active within compositional processes. Following Henri Bergson, it proposes that such becomings are ‘more-than-human’, habitually eliding ‘human’ perception. This project engages process-based philosophy and process as ways of encountering matter’s movements, through and beyond human ‘subjects’ and material ‘objects’.Through this research, I develop an image of the threshold as the field through which ‘bodies’ are linked and elaborated, via matter’s creative becomings. The investigation of these concepts engages Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s artistic process of research-creation, where the intersection of thinking and doing is a generative threshold for the invention of techniques. Through artistic experimentation, I propose four thresholding techniques for composing in relation to material-force, and for opening on to more-than-human experience. My own techniques are developed in concert with an analysis of those at work in artistic praxes engaging process as compositional force: Pierre Huyghe; Nina Canell; Olafur Eliasson; Senselab (space for collective research-creation).Pausing~displacing proposes a technique for expanding the interval of duration, and accessing the more-than-human rhythms that it fields. It is elaborated through my initial multimodal sculptural experiments that slow and attend to different temporalities. Holding~circling proposes a technique for thresholding the tensions between framing/deframing. It emerges from sculptural/performative experiments in framing the event of sunset, and opening thresholds to new fields of relation. Feeling~following proposes an intuitive engagement with matter’s more-than-human movements. This technique emerges across sculptural/installation works that follow material lures for composing. Through further sculptural and textual experiments, swelling~spilling is proposed as a technique for amplifying the virtual potentials of material-forces within experiential thresholds, and making their difference felt.Thresholding techniques offer artistic propositions for becoming-sensitive to material becomings, such that matter is understood as creative force. They therefore articulate an ethics that situates the creative act as emergent from thresholds of relation. This project proposes a new understanding of processual practice as a mode of encountering more-than-human material becomings, and contributes research-creation techniques for engaging this relational threshold