The Art of Experiment

The Art of Experiment:
Post-pandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st Century
By Rolf Hughes, Rachel Armstrong
1.1 Overview
To establish the best ways for knowing how to sustain and develop life, The Art of Experiment: Postpandemic Knowledge Practices for 21st-Century Architecture and Design looks at the spectrum of different
kinds of knowledge that have shaped our world and examines what sort of knowing we need to navigate the
rapidly unfolding near future. The book is being completed in the midst of a climate emergency and the
COVID-19 pandemic. Such conditions underscore thecatastrophic blindness of human exceptionalism and
the urgency of reconceiving and reordering the ways we think and live. More agile forms of knowledge are
urgently needed to make possible lives-worth-living for all terrestrial species, not just the human animal.
While this book does not propose an overview that will satisfy historians of science, philosophers or
professional epistemologists—nor even a solution to the present existential crisis of our species—it looks to
expand our ways of knowing and practices that seek to increase the habitability of the planet for humans and
nonhumans, resulting in an anticipated increased biodiversity and cleaner oceans and atmosphere. Aiming
to catalyse our enchantment with our world and its (re)enlivening, we explore the ontology of knowledge and
its various expressions by considering the world's deep history. In this sense, we necessarily engage notions
of understanding that exceed the unique status of knowing attributed to disciplines that humans have refined
over centuries, setting the scene for different modes of inhabitation that are relevant to these turbulent times.
Our present anthropocentric desires, expressed in imperialist language, submit our planet to neocolonising
attitudes, anthropocentric values, welfare abuses of nonhumans, industrial exploitation and highly partial
interpretations of events. The consequences of our human exceptionalism and dogged anthropocentrism are
profound. Subordinating our world to a restricted interpretation of events, weimpose devastating regimes that
disregard the complexity and freedoms of the living realm. As a result, we face immense challenges of our
own making, challenges that now characterise the Anthropocene, an epoch that has arguably been in
gestation for around 500 years.
Our present ways of knowing made new sense of a highly piecemeal understanding of reality that dates back
to classical times. Initially proposing to improve conditions for humankind by understanding how God's
household (Fuller, 2011), or Nature, worked, the strict formulation and regulation of these findings within
laboratories meant they were highly ritualised, exclusive, reductive, objectoriented, human—centred,
hierarchical, updatable and resistant to external influences. The world that sprang from this tightly controlled
canon of Enlightenment knowledge gave rise to the Industrial Revolution, advanced machines and
modernity. The learning we have subsequently acquired is a potent resource that is divided up into specific
territories. Separated by disciplinary walls and defended by institutions like universities and royal societies,
scientific knowledge has become subject to professional consensus, which decides which participants are fit
to practise or hold authority over specific canons of understanding.
A way of thinking that we might characterise as having been colonised has kept us in these established
knowledge silos, generating narrow perspectives with repeated blind spots and oversights in our
understanding of the world. Even when we are encouraged to talk to each other and cross-fertilise our
perspectives, the resultant hybrid practices are appreciated as cross—, multi—, inter-, trans- and even
postdisciplinary practices. Having served their purpose, they are subsumed again into the familiar knowledge
traditions that, critically, lack an ethics and mature tool set for making a transition from the modern Industrial
Era toward an ecological era of human development, or Ecocene.
In search of a new tool set of knowledge instruments that enable people to make the world livable again
through negotiated partnerships with nonhuman agents, we consider that many different kinds of knowledge
instruments are needed to invoke and acknowledge the potency of nonhuman agency. To achieve this goal,
we examine four key phases in the origin of thinking, each of which plays a key role in our ways of knowing:
material, strengthening, reconfiguring and extending.
Material knowledge
Exceeding our epistemological understanding, we search for primordial knowledge within the nonhuman
realm. Starting with the birth of the universe and the strangeness of its fundamental particles, we explore the
Great Enfolding of matter that produced our world and its life forms. Viewed through the lens of
contemporary science, we propose a new set of relations that suggest that knowledge resides within nature.
Not presently recognisable in human terms, the forms of knowledge sought here occur through the intraactions of matter (Barad, 2007), comprising decision-making processes so tiny and strange they do not
readily map on to anthropocentric concerns and may have already generated nonhuman civilisations that we
have simply overlooked. This potent decision-making potential of matter is not separate from us but
constitutes our flesh and enables the human brain, with its particular kind of intelligence, to come into being.
Strengthening knowledge
Looking to the events that first separated people from the natural realm, we examine the origins of human
exceptionalism in Western traditions through the privileged status conferred on human thought that
structured the world in its own image. To strengthen the realm of human thought, we consider Aristotle's
knowledge instrument, the Organon, which helped develop the science of reasoning, or logic, by organising
forms of knowing into different categories, generating a tool set for reason and relation and inviting us to give
an account of what we see and learn.
Reconfiguring knowledge
Marking the advent of modern knowledge, the radical separation of the mind—or spirit through God—from
matter and the laws of nature positioned humanity at the apex of evolution. Formalised through new ways of
knowing, Francis Bacon's Novum Organum proposed the "correct" method of acquiring knowledge of
nature's particulars through a new science that was configured by an entirely different method, order and
process of advancing experience than ancient wisdom. Such empiricism took the form of an intellectual
pursuit, encoded and enacted through the rarefied material actions of machines. Making possible the
Industrial Revolution, its extreme abstractions heightened the divisions between human and nature,
culminating in the climate crisis. This section, however, explores the movement of research into its "dark
continents"—areas of knowledge-generating practices which had hitherto largely evaded science's militaryindustrial spotlight. This chapter focuses on art and design practices and their relation to interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary research, describing alternative ways of knowing as a counterpoint and alternative
configuration to the Enlightenment's increasing alienation from nature.
"Most of us will never apprehend this real mathematical world of blinding light, stuck as we
are in the compost heap of a lesser realm. Instead of generating facts, our social worlds are
defined by the sweat of our experiences, half-baked ideas presenting to be fully-formed
facts, gossip, cultural conditions, outrageous doctrines and funky faith. The secondary world
of appearances."
(Akomolafe, 2019, para. 12)
Invoking the more-than-human realm in the quest to secure the ongoingness of our own species and all life
on Earth, this section seeks ways of extending our knowledge so that our collective actions increase
planetary enlivening. Looking to the uncategorisable expressions of the natural world that could not be
contained by rationality—such as angels, monsters and Animalia Paradoxa—a more holistic viewpoint and
tool set are sought that are fit for the challenges of the ecological era. Adopting a new materialist
perspective, whereby nonhuman entities possess agency, the Organa Paradoxa is introduced: emerging
paradoxical tools capable of engendering different modes of understanding that can realign human and
natural power structures through values that establish a new kind of livability. Capable of retelling the story of
our planet, these new knowledge instruments enable humanity to play a humbler, yet more critical role in coconstituting our worlds.
Worlding case studies
Exploring the process of worlding through performance, creative writing and the production of artefacts,
worlding experiments that explore the themes of monstering, the inner life of nonhumans and an expanded
notion of what it means to be human are described based on explorations conducted by the Experimental
Architecture Group (E.A.G.).I The implications for an expanded realm of knowledge decentre the human
figure around which the known universe is organised and offer new terrains for discovery. Such insights
require new values, actions, exchanges, politics, economics and ethics, so that we can remake our worlds in
a manner that both enriches our own understanding and is beneficial to many nonhuman others in ways that
increase the overall liveliness of the living realm. Since understanding exists not in isolation but in relation to
other events and agencies, the ground rules for unfolding knowledge within these realms enable the process
of human development to respond to a rapidly changing and increasingly turbulent world and exert
qualitatively different effects in the short and longer terms.
This book therefore describes a journey of understanding that exceeds the knowledge of humans and
reaches out both into the deep past and forward into an ongoing and increasingly vigorous future.
Acknowledgement
We acknowledge all members of the nonhuman, terrestrial realm—past, present, future—that contribute to
the spiritual, emotional, creative, physical and mental well-being of all creatures. Paying our respects to the
many who are not like "us," we appreciate their myriad, invisible actions and investments made in our world,
which make every part inhabitable and beings like "us" possible.
Note
The Experimental Architecture Group (E.A.G.) was founded in 2017 by Rachel By Rolf Hughes, Rachel
Armstrong, Rolf Hughes and Simone Ferracina to bring artistic and design-led experiment into juxtaposition
with the technological repertoire of "living technologies. "
Bibliography
Akomolafe, B. , 2019. What climate collapse asks of us. The Emergence Network. Available from:
www.emergencenetwork.org/whatclimatecollapseasksofus/ (accessed 19.09.19.).
Barad, K., 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning. Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina.
Fuller, S., 2011. Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human, Past, Present and Future. Palgrave Macmillan,
Houndmills, UK.
Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science and New Media
Publication date: 2011-01
ISBN: 9197859885, 978-9197859882
Publisher: AxlBooks
Con las prácticas del arte, la ciencia y la tecnología cada vez más convergentes, los conceptos de origen
y originalidad plantean algunas de las preguntas más urgentes en la investigación contemporánea,
incluidas cuestiones de agencia y responsabilidad, hibridación e identidad, propiedad intelectual y
obra, intención y autoridad. Estos, y una constelación de preocupaciones flosófcas, económicas,
estéticas, legislativas y políticas relacionadas, están hoy sujetas a una rápida reconfguración debido al
ritmo actual de cambio tecnológico y teórico. En consecuencia, Second Nature introduce en un diálogo
productivo e interdisciplinario a los estudiosos que trabajan en las intersecciones del arte, la ciencia y
la tecnología. Las contribuciones exploran cómo las tecnologías de reproducción alteran el signifcado
de conceptos como origen y originalidad, y cómo las fronteras entre lo que consideramos "auténtico" y
"falso", "natural" y "artifcial" están en constante negociación y transformación. La investigación
interdisciplinaria y transdisciplinaria exige repensar nuestras ortodoxias discursivas y metodológicas
existentes. Second Nature llega como una respuesta oportuna, iluminando los debates
contemporáneos sobre la reproducción digital y biológica, la naturaleza y la tecnología, el arte y la
autenticidad, la criticidad y la hibridación.