Paper short abstract:

An experimental atelier adapts media art, speculative performance, poetic engineering, critical studies of technoscience to pursue an "alchemical" response to the problem of solidarity. An alchemical approach would start non-anthropocentrically. How can it trellis ethico-aesthetic play?

Paper long abstract:

I tell the story of a cosmopolitical and experimental approach to the problem of solidarity across difference: Even if my kind of people and your kind of people each attain what our peoples want, why should I care about you? This approach requires a critical engagement and re-construction at individual, collective, and institutional scales with the methods and self-conceptions of several worlds of practice: media arts, experimental performance, engineering lab, interaction design, social justice activism, ecological activism, radical philosophy. We can see this amalgamation of incommensurate worlds as an alchemical response to what Stengers and others call capitalist sorcery and barbarism.

Architect Christopher Alexander called for a physics fusing matter and value à la Spinoza, rather than matter formed only by geometry (Einstein) or number (Pythagoras). With makers and theorists I explore the qualities of matter construed as laden with value, to borrow Bilgrami's phrase. I transmute Whitehead's axiom of process philosophy, "How an entity becomes constitutes what the entity is," to move from a concern about values of objects to concerns about value-generating or value-signifying processes. On one hand the conceptual project reconstructs care - the primordial to politics - in terms of textural natality—perceived as poiesis, as stuff not objects, hence alchemy not sorcery.

On the other hand, the Topological Media Lab (topologicalmedialab.net) and now the Synthesis Center (synthesiscenter.net) have built arguably non-anthropocentric techniques and tactics for conditioning the felt experience of an experimental event to trellis ethico-aesthetic play.