Teaching More-than-human Invitation in Artistic Research and Pedagogy

Attention to more-than-human in artistic and design research spans a wide range of concerns: from problematizing inclusion or authorship, to addressing environmental destruction. It raises the question on who is invited to act and how. More specifically, attention to more-than-human invitation problematizes human-centeredness in practicing and teaching art and design, engages with uncertainty in exact sciences, and offers to rearticulate the notion of performativity in humanities. These broad gestures are centered around core ideas explored in posthumanism and feminist new materialism, which, together with other post-anthropocentric philosophical frameworks and approaches to studies of culture, unsettle human-centeredness and foreground the problems of indeterminism and uncertainty in exact sciences. The notion of performativity is important as a concept that demonstrates the materiality of theory and language, by connecting materialist concerns in studies of literature and philosophy of language to materialist concerns in gender theory. This text is a proposal to pay attention to the more-than-human by observing the directionality of invitations: where they come from, where they go and how they are received.