True Colors: Chromaticity, Realism and Technological Honesty

I propose an application of agential realism to my practice as research, a film about my mother getting one tattoo covered with a new one, to investigate the material-discursive role played by the camera in determining meaning within the film image. I use my practice as a comparative case study, considering how a specific camera apparatus determines and negotiates standards of colour accuracy, and what it means to remove those colour values in post-production. I argue that the different colour processing of the same footage produces perceptible onto-epistemological difference, even while it remains indexically equivalent. Second, I will show exactly how this particular digital photosensitive technology meets the pro-filmic event to record colour, enacting agencies that reduce matter to fit a specifically programmed colour system, prior to any manipulation in post-production. The system itself draws the boundaries of accuracy it claims to achieve, with inevitable ethical implications.

A physical education/environmental education nexus: Transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum for a sense of belonging

Physical education (PE) is a site that brings categories of difference under erasure, presenting a wicked problem for how a sense of belonging is cultivated for all learners to foster physical activity, health and wellbeing across the lifespan. This article explores how, we, as two teachers of PE, turned to postqualitative and ‘new’ materialist inquiry to generate a sense of belonging within a PE/environmental education nexus. Taking up Karen Barad’s agential realism and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, we conceptualise this PE/environmental education nexus as a transdisciplinary approach to curriculum that enacts a knowing/being/thinking/doing between, and across, borders, boundaries, categories, fields and practices. We then show how this nexus was actualised in our teaching practices through two vignettes. As transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum are grounded in the lived, embodied and embedded (micro) politics of location, individuals are imbued with affective obligation to enact affirmative patterns of relating moment-to-moment. This means that a sense of belonging is always imminent, invented and co-created, bringing attention to situated obligations to enact good relations with ourselves, each other and wider planetary systems.

Post-Humanism, Mutual Aid

This chapter commences with an in-depth exploration of the way the concrete computations of AI become entrained with unfairness and neoliberal politics. It will traverse from the operations of loss functions and optimisers at a tensor level to the ensuing discrimination, social ranking and administrative violence, making visible the ways in which AI becomes productive of both supremacism and the means by which to enact it. The second half of the chapter will propose ways in which machine learning can be reclaimed for the purposes of non-fascist living. Looking to a post-AI politics, the text challenges representationalism via Barad’s agential realism and puts forward a practical recomposition based on people’s and workers councils. The aim is to transform the character of AI from paranoid targeting to prefigurative relationality.

Composing Fragmented Relations With Materials, Locations, and Archives

In this chapter we build on a relational perspective to sound art, drawing on theories of mobilities research and agential realism to explore the nature and texture of relations that are not only human but material, temporal, spatial and mobile. Informed by our work about a World War I memorial Homing (2016), we describe sound production as the composition of fragmented relations. These various aspects of fragmentation do not, however, make the work fall apart. Instead, within the building of a locative sound work, fragmentation becomes central to composition. Fragments are tied together, not into a smooth flow, but into a textured experience, as sound is used as a kind of connective tissue bringing disparate elements into relationships. We therefore suggest that by focusing on a Baradian reading of relationality in sound art, fragmented relations can be seen as both leading to composition and simultaneously being produced by its situated nature.

Materiality

This chapter offers an examination of sonic materiality from a perspective strongly influenced by various strands of contemporary ontology, in particular Graham Harman’s object oriented ontology, Karen Barad’s agential realism, and Timothy Morton’s synthesis of sundry speculative realist approaches. The core argument of the chapter, supported by aspects of each of the theorists just mentioned, is that sound exists as part of the energetic entanglement of objects, a ‘hyper-object’ (Morton) established in ‘intra-action’ (Barad), which reveals the otherwise withdrawn (Harman) qualities and propensities of these multiple participants, including the human auditor and the medium which propagates sound. In this way, sound can be described as a kind of fabric, both ‘something made’ (fabricated) and made of the interweave of multiple elements.

Plants, Pathogens, and the Politics of Care: Xylella fastidiosa and the Intra-active Breakdown of Mallorca’s Almond Ecology

Almonds were once “the gold of Mallorca,” a source of modest wealth and a pillar of diversified farming systems for smallholders on the largest of Spain’s Balearic Islands. Now researchers believe nearly every rainfed almond tree on the island will be dead within as few as five years. The introduced bacteria Xylella fastidiosa, enabled by its spittle-bug vector, and emboldened by climate change, has flooded the xylem of these rainfed trees, impeding the flow of fluid and nutrients to the point where the tree can no longer survive. This article enrolls feminist theorizations of care and agential realism to broaden the political scope and stakes of a plant epidemic. I argue that by attending to the care relations underlying pathogenicity we can shift from narratives of landscape purification toward a more-than-human politics of care. Abstracto Una vez las almendras eran “el oro de Mallorca,” una fuente de riqueza modesta y un pilar de un sistema de agricultura diversificada para los payeses (campesinos) de la isla más grande del archipiélago balear de España. Actualmente los investigadores creen que casi todos los almendros de la isla pueden morir dentro de cinco años. Una bacteria introducida,Xylella fastidiosa, apoyada por su insecto vector, el salivazo, y animada por el cambio climático, ha inundado la xilema de los almendros de secano, impidiendo la circulación de fluidos y nutrientes hasta el punto de que el árbol no puede sobrevivir. Este artículo emplea teorizaciones feministas del cuidado y del realismo agencial para ampliar el alcance político de una epidemia de plantas. Argumento que teniendo en cuenta las relaciones de cuidado subyacentes de la patogenicidad, podemos pasar de los temas de purificación del paisaje a una política más-que-humano del cuidado.

The Lively Intra-Actions of Athleisure: A Baradian Analysis of Fit Femininity

Since the early 2000s, athleisure (clothing designed for physical activity) has been gaining popularity as both a functional and fashionable clothing trend, particularly among women. Thus far, scholars have explored the gendered nature of athleisure and the neoliberal, postfeminist, and healthism discourses present within this fitness clothing phenomenon. However, the research has yet to account for the materiality of athleisure and its impacts upon women's experiences of fitness and the construction of idealized female bodies. In this article, we use new materialist theory, specifically Karen Barad's agential realism, to explore the material-discursive dimensions of athleisure. Drawing upon a diffractive analysis of interviews conducted with 22 women in Aotearoa New Zealand, in conjunction with social media analyses, we explore two lively intra-actions of women's athleisure-clad moving bodies – the ‘muffin top’ and the ‘big booty’ – to reveal what athleisure does to/with women's bodies. We highlight how these athleisure-body intra-actions work to create boundaries around acceptable femininity and give rise to particular constructions and meanings of women's bodies.

Agential realism meets feminist art. A diffractive dialogue between writers, theories and art

This article invites readers to follow our diffractive dialogue, which reflects on our interdisciplinary collaboration in thinking and writing with Karen Barad. Working with Barad’s diffractive methodology, we bring her agential realism, insights from quantum physics and feminist theories to contemporary feminist art. The aesthetic practices of three art works are discussed, and we argue that these call for an understanding of eco-, capitalist-, colonialist- and feminist critique as interrelated phenomena in the sense of agential realism. This is because it is not only the art works themselves that create encounter-moments of being-entangled with the bodies and discourses that surround them. From a methodological perspective, we are also interested in marking diffractive moments of encounter with the art works and between us, given our different disciplinary backgrounds. So, we intend to open up a space of encounters between Barad’s work, the work of the three artists and the work of ourselves as writers.

How exercises matter as a dramaturgical approach in performance art education

This article addresses a university course in performance art at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. The aim of this article is to discuss how the exercises and the dramaturgy of the exercises in the course matter. The author is the teacher of the course and thus the diffractive analysis is informed by her role as a teacher and artist-researcher. The study uses new material feminist theory and the theory of agential realism from physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad. The study investigates how the exercises become agents and get constitutive power. The exercises are material-discursive, in intra-action and entangled with the entire teaching environment, and they compose a dramaturgical structure that allows the unpredictable to happen. The analysis describes three examples of exercises from the course and highlights three aspects that matter in the mediation of the exercises – embodiment, materiality, and site. The results of the study point toward the importance of mediating exercises that activate the student-participants to experiment and redefine what the ever-changing field of performance art can be.