elizabeth / danm 249/ interview

About Karen Barad

Preparation

While I feel that my studio work relates to several collaborative research areas, for the purposes of this assignment I will be emphasizing those aspects related to the areas of Mechatronics and Performative Technologies. Mechatronics involves the incorporation of mechanical, electronic, and information technology into works that investigate temporality, materiality, experience, and perception. Simultaneously, Performative Technologies combines these mechatronic technologies with more traditional media in order to create the visual, aural, sensual, and connective experience of performance.

Last quarter, my questions surrounding the archive and the comparable notions text and textile unwound to encompass another pair of concepts now informing my studio practice- technologies of memory and imagined communities. We are already always implicated in the things we think through. This is the theme I draw from Prof. Barad’s work that connects most distinctly with my current art practice.

Looking at Professor Barad's list of selected publications leads me to believe she might offer interesting insight into discourse and matter as they variously function through and as technologies of memory, in particular I am curious about the ontolgical and epistemological implications and possibilities within different theories of matter, performativity and agential realism in particular, as well as the materials themselves. In addition, her work in queer and feminist studies may be useful toward exploring gender and sexuality in weaving and woven work.

Possible interview questions:

1. What are your research investments? What is important to you in your work? What is your approach?
2. How did you come to this field of research?
3. Were there any key turning points that lead you to this combination of physics, science studies, and queer/feminist theory?
4. Could your describe breifly your concept of agential realism?
5. What is the relationship between performativity and physics? What is perfomativity?
6. What is/Is there the relationship between art and science? What is the function of interdisciplinarity? What is interdisciplinarity?
7. How is thinking about diffraction central to your work? How is thinking through diffraction helpful as opposed to thinking through reflection?
8. Concerning temporalites... is there a relationship between memory, material, time, and space?

Results...forthcoming