boundaries do not sit still / a.pass (Brussels) january-april 018

[Research centre 18/I curated by Femke Snelting]

In Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter, feminist theorist Karen Barad examines how apparatuses stabilize and destabilize boundaries. “Apparatuses are dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted.” she writes.


As an ‘external guest’ invited into the research center from January until April 2018, I would like to turn Barad’s parental advisory into an invitation to experiment, speculate and reflect on the intra-actions through which in- and exclusionary boundaries are performed in a.pass itself.

Boundaries do not sit still follows from a long interest in the interdependent relations between technology and practice, resulting in a series of projects and questions that have been invited into dialogue with a.pass at several occasions.

How do digital tools and artistic research co-construct each other? How are gestures, discourses and behaviours shaped, oriented, communicated and defined through the (digital) apparatuses at work? How is research articulated and in what way are its boundaries enacted through software, infrastructures and devices?

These questions will be addressed in mentorings, informal meetings within/around a.pass and in research activities related to The Possible Bodies inventory. In addition, I will host five Monday Readings (with Martino Morandi, Seda Guerses and Sina Seifee).

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At the start of 2018, Possible Bodies is one-and-a-half year under-way. It will have had rotations in an art institution in Stuttgart (Schloss Solitude), a technology-oriented centre for arts production and research (Hangar) and a design college (Bau) in Barcelona. From January onward, we open up the inventory in and to a.pass as a resource to be reworked, annotated, appropriated and expanded. Possible Bodies changes rhythm in order to prepare a fourth rotation in the fall that might take the shape of a publication.

The presence of the Possible Bodies inventory, its methodologies and some of its agents at a.pass can hopefully allow further inquiries into the tensions between ‘probable’ and ‘possible’. As an object of study, we will for example be exploring the workings and worldings of Slicer, an open source software platform for medical image informatics, image processing, and three-dimensional visualization. The software ecology of Slicer interests us because it allows us to explore processes of articulation, dissection, separation, segmentation, segregation and difference.

+info: https://apass.be/boundaries-do-not-sit-still/ + https://apass.be/possible-bodies/