Notes on : Bayley, A. And Chan, J.
(Eds) (2023) Diffracting New Materialisms
Emerging Methods in Artistic Research and Higher
Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Dave Harris
Bayley A. Entanglements and the Many-Worlded
Doing of Research – Based Practice, practice –
based research, Practice – as – Research and
Post-qualitative Inquiry in the Academy (3--
14)
Practice is apparently emergent and structures
contexts including assessments and accreditations.
Practice is the site of contestation and a site of
theory, but embodied knowledges in particular
'signal that there may be more than one world'
(3). Some will not be traceable back to a
'European, enlightenment heritage' and some will
be obviously more embodied.
Practice was divided from theory via differences
that the Academy has inculcated. Theory is
critical and practice is not, for example instead
we need to see them as flows of knowledge and
knowledge making and investigate new patterns and
configurations that emerge, especially via
timelines, the matter of justice and how the
erotic appears in various epistemic practices
especially in artistic research. Then some waffle
about positioning, including the positioning of
the authors and editors of the book. The
articulations include the possibilities in the
title as a few possibilities about artistic
research. These modes 'begin the dance, the
breath, and the being – with that I hope will
diffract in the relationships to position, and
momentum, that you make through the apparatus of
your own artistic, scholarly, educative, activist
and other life/lives' (for) [I think we've got the
measure of this]
They think of it as involving Barad's notion of
entanglement, specifically the absorption of the
subject/object divide, the way in which phenomena
'are cut by modes of observation into being'
(five). There is also Haraway's '"tentacular
thinking"' where one arm of the octopus acts
independently but it still remains an octopus.
Phenomena do not intersect. Matter is doing and
there is an 'entangled onto-epistemology' which is
a 'part of the ongoing flow of movement
itself'. As a result, 'methodologies and
their methods make worlds and this is active,
political and engaging, resonating with activism
action and justice. Thinking this way opens us to
many worlds and opportunities to 'practice the
world anew as part of the entanglement' (6), new
kinds of inclusions and exclusions and marks on
bodies, different identities.
Justice 'matters'. The flow of movement 'that we
call the world' is not just intersectional,
something outside, but at a different level of
specificity. Justice can be considered as
'constituted through entanglement and as a matter
of movements… A resonance that is as central and
specific to existence as time', a phenomenon, or
'apparatus through which we might create history'
and at the same time 'an intimate companion,
constantly changing the body into something else'.
It is something unfolding and pedagogical,
involving different kinds of worlds.
How do we do this — we perform research as the
editors and contributors go. Often they perform
with 'inherited hauntings of research from worlds
that affirm vitalisms, essentialisms,
metaphysics or fixitties'. But we have to find new
ways to diffract our thinking through new
materialist practice committed to justice. This
transcends the usual organisation of research into
the 'intra-sectional or entangled', and this is
world building.
We have to consider de and reterritorialisations
in the Academy. Artistic practice is an
epistemology, a way of knowing the world and in
this case entangling how we know is what we now,
and 'onto-epistemology that allows for multiple
world's to exist together – apart' (7), a matter
of 'diffractive, material – discursive encounters
that emerge together'. This is 'risky and
rebellious', a matter of using the master's tools
to build worlds inside the crevices and gaps. We
have to focus on what matters and how meaning is
folded into our practices.
Research – based practice, or research- led
practice follows the model of research first in
practice and this is common in the Academy. It is
Cartesian or traditional, but we can challenge it
by asking what we mean by research as a phenomena
— is it ontology, is it a privilege method? Its
links with practice are often conflated, but
research is privileged in building the apparatus,
for example it might impose a timeline as in cause
and effect, or a sequence of policy-making in
artistic work: this can be expedient. Practice –
based research reverses the flow. Lorde suggests
it is based on the erotic, the sense of completion
and fulfilment and this is dangerous to the
established order, if it underpins all the ways we
know the world: it has its 'own inherent
intelligence and knowledge making' (10). The
choice between the two so far involves different
entrance points, different practices, different
research experiences, different politics. We are
already beginning to see the possibility of
entanglement and diffraction.
Practice-based research must avoid reduction:
instead we have to consider 'particular
diffraction patterns… You, your pen, the page you
right on, or your screen and pixels… As if
flickering in and out of existence, from virtual
to actual and back again'. Reverse the direction
and get new diffractions. You are left with 'a
swirling, shifting, swerving, resonating, moving
ontology of diffractions' (11), with several
entrance points or 'diffractive possibilities'. We
could list the differences that these different
patterns make. They highlight the process by which
research makes a difference, 'the way difference
is actually made' and this is especially important
if we need to look at justice or injustice at the
micro level and open ourselves to chaos and many
worlds.
Post-qualitative enquiry 'shifts and slides
through all of these' referring back to ghostly
heritages of artistic research practices. However
it diffracts these heritages through post-humanism
and new materialism, with the special attention
paid to 'the entanglement of matter and meaning'
(12). Lather and St Pierre say we must question
attachments that keep us from thinking and living
differently, constantly attend to our practices
['diffractive practices' of course]. We must
re-inscribe ethics, seek unjust practices and be
prepared to engage in '"reparative"' mode' (13).
We must question attachments between matter and
meaning, focus on entanglement and matterings, and
see the way in which phenomena arrives as a
results, using Barad.. All the current trends can
therefore 'diffract through one another to produce
new research'.
There are lots of other approaches, but they all
share a commitment to potential to create new
configurations of ethically responsible open
movements, new reconfigurations of artistic modes
of thinking and doing the world a new.
[Fluffy and confused bollocks]]
Schrader, A. Diffraction as Cross
– Disciplinary Methodology between Science and
Arts (15 –39)
Arts are often supposed to make science more
accountable and accessible, while science can act
as resource for innovative arts. This chapter
offers 'a diffractive cross disciplinary
methodology in which the disciplines get neither
synthesised nor merely serve one another' (15).
Following Barad (2007 p.89), a diffractive
methodology 'investigates how "the world is
materialised differently through different
practices"'. Different modes of thought are 'read
or worked through one another to engender creative
and unexpected outcomes.
Haraway elaborated her notion as a tool for
feminist research. She also cited Randolph and a
painting called Diffraction 'that depicts
multiple selves inhabiting one body'. In the 'omcomouse'
piece she says diffraction is a 'material –
semiotic tool' to be added to 'syntactics,
semantics and pragmatics in semiotic theory' (20).
There are links to scientific phenomena and also
optical ones. Optical metaphors are updated in a
way that emphasises the 'particularity of embodied
ways of seeing'. Optical instruments are also
semiotic and figurations material practices.
Haraway's term is 'figures' — 'neither literal nor
self identical, they engender uncertainties and
displacements' (21). The visual and the verbal
'are inexplicably tangled'.
Haraway reads Latour to say that science studies
has also moved away from mimesis between the
object studied and the method of study. Instead,
figural interpretations offer '"a connection
between two events or persons in such a way that
the first signifies not only itself but also the
second, while the second involves or fulfils the
first"' [citing Haraway 1997]. This 'deconstructs
mimesis and its self-fulfilling temporality'. In
her book on the promises of monsters,
Haraway develops the notion of 'inappropriate/d
otherness' [from Trinh Minh-ha]. This refers to
relations between people and organic and inorganic
beings and refers to a '"critical, deconstructive
relationality, in a diffracting rather than
reflecting (ratio)nality — as the means of making
potent connection that exceeds domination"'
[Haraway 2004]. This undoes dialectical
oppositions but stresses differences 'within the
belly of the monster', appropriating Greimas and
the way he constructs narrative through
dialectical oppositions: instead 'places and
stories are re-composed from interference
patterns' [apparently you place stories in
interacting squares but not in dialectical
opposition]. This means that 'diffraction may
engender relations between events occurring in
different times'. Basically, the structural device
in Greimas is used to interrupt the ordinary
course of things, to deconstruct relationalities,
and a diffraction pattern '"does not map where
differences appear, but rather maps where the
effects of difference appears… The history of
interaction, interference, reinforcement,
difference… Heterogeneous history"'. Overall, this
revolutionises semiotics and 'diffractions tear
down the entire Euclidean geometry that depicts
space as a container and time as an external
parameter' (22).
Barad also opposes classical notions of reflection
and diffraction, which still see the optical
apparatus independent of the object of study. For
her diffraction is not only about difference but
'"about entangled differences that matter"'
[citing 2007] — the apparatus is 'inseparably
tangled with what it diffracts, always about the
'undecidability/indeterminacy between what
functions as technology/apparatus and what is the
object of that articulation/measurement'.
Intra-actions cannot be separated from patterns:
so effects of differences do not just mean those
which follow interactions in time.
Bozalek and Zembylas (2017) therefore see
diffraction as a process and as a result,
'ontologically a being and becoming… How we record
interferences matters to which differences come to
matter' [still evasive in my view]. Diffraction is
a process of producing difference so a diffractive
methodology 'implies a profound reworking of
research, teaching, reading and writing
processes', as revealed in her own table 1 [3
characteristics from Barad — interference patterns
rather than mirror images, differences from
within, reading through, as opposed to their
opposites].
The actual literature 'describes many different
forms of descriptive practices; the common
denominator is a focus on relationality,
materiality, creativity and the unexpected' [every
reason to be highly suspicious about all of them].
As a result, the concept has attracted interest in
the arts. For example dancing problematises
boundaries between teachers and learners, subject
and object, embodiment and theorisation.
'The most common form of a diffractive methodology
is a diffractive reading practice [!] In which
different texts are read through each other rather
than against each other' (23) this is more than
just reading data through various conceptual
lenses because it generates differences 'through
mostly unexpected interferences' [hmmm]. Some
texts encourage interference with other text more
than others. Texts include material observations
and other ethnographic practices.
Mengus and Nicolini (2021) say diffraction is a
metaphor rather than a practical orientation and
it remains open 'unclear how diffraction can be
used in research practices...[it]... Can be
interpretive, and methodology, or inventive'. A
central concept for artists is the notion of the
gaze acknowledging that seeing is socially and
historically constituted, and M and N translate
the gaze as Baradian apparatus, 'a set of material
– discursive practices that are productive of the
phenomenon', something that is not just in the eye
of the interpreter or the interpretations of the
viewers, but something culturally constituted. To
make a difference, an alternative gaze needs to be
mobilised, to generate interference, and M and N
propose 'conversation with a "relational
materialist gaze"'. Another video artist stresses
the need for '"embodied engagement with the
materiality of the research data"', which will
apparently emphasise embodiment materiality,
reconnecting 'the artwork this method of
production', going beyond representational
analysis alone. This is like Lenz Taguchi engaging
with the materiality of the research data, and
shows that 'a diffractive methodology is
essentially performative'.
Barad says that diffraction is a dynamism,
integral to mattering, generating 'a multiplicity
of moments within what they call a "thick now"',
some '"infinitely rich condensed now in a changing
field, diffracted across space-time"' [citing
2014]. They have changed their view of time since
2007 inspired by both Benjamin [in 2017] and
Derrida [2010] and also 'findings in quantum
physics on "temporal diffraction"' [unrefd]. 'What
seems to be clear' [!] Is that there is 'no
meaning of time outside specific material
discursive apparatuses' (25). Sometimes time is
seen as 'a multiplicity of (holographic) moments'
[in Barad 2017], (25) sometimes time is created in
the action [2010], sometimes '"diffracted through
itself"' [2017], or 'diffracted "through the
present moment, like the play of light inside a
crystal"' [2017 again]. [I read this as just
different metaphors] In 2017, Barad argues
that temporal diffraction is a manifestation of a
lesser-known '"indeterminacy principle… The time –
energy indeterminacy principle… [Where]… A given
entity can be in (a state of) superposition of
different times… A state of indeterminate being
coexisting multiple times — for example,
yesterday, today and tomorrow"' [2017 page 67
apparently].
Her own work shows that 'ontology itself can
become '"history"/dependent' where, as Barad
argues, '"no absolute boundary" exists "between
here – now and there – then"' [citing Barad 2014].
Anything new 'is necessarily aporetic…
Simultaneously connected to a past (to be
recognised as something) and disconnected from it
(in order to count as new)' [but this is not new
ontology, merely a definition of the new?]
This is crucial to understand creativity in the
arts especially. Jones has argued that we need to
know how to let go of knowledge, that 'temporal
paradox lies at the heart of creativity' and
originality — it must draw on existing knowledge
and skill, but must be disconnected from
tradition. This is 'temporal undecided ability (or
spectrality) '. The Kantian notion of the sublime
suggest something transcendental that can still be
recuperated through rationality but there are
other notions of 'not – knowing', some inherent
grasp of infinity.
In science, according to Stengers, not knowing is
a virtue but it has been disciplined, and there is
a need for a new possibility of encountering
different forms and reproducing them without
prematurely subjecting them to a general law. We
need to remain with what is 'in principle
determinable and representable' (26) and the
failure of current representation, but avoid a
notion of representation 'that assumes an absolute
externality the human observer and the world that
would remain unaffected by the observation of it'
(26).
A diffractive methodology suggests a new approach
to 'spaces of indeterminacy'. Agential realism
offers an ontological notion of indeterminacy, an
'ontological inseparability, and entanglement of
an "object of study" and the "agencies of
observation"'. There is nothing outside phenomena,
but we can get new diffraction patterns through
superposition or interference, remembering that '"an
interference pattern is an objective mark of a
superposition"' [citing Barad 2007 p 269 ), and
superpositions 'are the embodiment of a quantum
indeterminacy'. Therefore 'superpositions
of scientific and artistic practices
{?} may change relations of knowing'.
[SO -- clear ref to the quantum notion of
superposition here and above, but what about the
use in bold italic?]
First we have to clear away some stereotypes. Art
is new, science is static, art does not produce
answers to questions or knowledge but generates
affects and experiences. To be receptive to
difference you have to cultivate ignorance and
otherness [this is how recognition of difference =
surprise is manufactured in research] . The
audience must be involved with the arts project.
There are also differences in terms of agency —
agents describe or discover and science and create
in arts, reveal what's always been there or create
something new, require management in order to be
objective and 'make the object of investigation
appear to speak for itself' [citing Latour] (27),
while it is almost the opposite in the creative
arts.
In science, transformations transpose things like
soil samples into data and records, and in this
case study, 'creative intervention is required to
transform the life history of an aquatic snail
into videos of transparent blobs in a petri dish'.
Experimental biology does not try to describe
nature, of course but to approximate natural
conditions in the laboratory. However, mimicry can
'be strategically employed in the arts' (28)
sometimes playfully. Diffractive methodologies can
also render things visible just like playful
mimicry, but with a different notion of agency,not
arty humans but the whole
material-discursive apparatus [make the
methodology appear to speak for itself again?].
The relations between subjects and objects shifts,
breaking the stereotypes above. The creativity in
science and the rule-boundedness in arts becomes
visible -- 'the art in science and the science in
art'
So [recapping and going back a page] a diffractive
methodology offers a different way to cultivate
'spaces of indeterminacy'. Indeterminacy is now an
ontological matter, due to 'ontological
inseparability', an entanglement between an object
of study and the agencies of observation. There is
nothing outside of phenomena and the apparatuses
that bring them about. There can only be new
diffraction patterns produced by new superpositions
or interferences of things, phenomena or
disciplines. Superpositions represent
'ontological indeterminate states — states
with no determinate fact of the matter concerning
the property in question' (26) [citing Barad 2007p
265] [but these are known unknowns]. So 'super
positions of scientific and artistic practices
may change relations of knowing'.
Haraway says diffractive reading practices are
related to transdisciplinary skills [always?], So
reading a scientific experiment requires different
skills from reading a novel and those skills will
'"interact [sic] diffractively"' (28). Different
skills can reinforce and interrupt each other just
like interfering waves. Haraway calls these
'"jokes"' [but are they regular or haphazard?].
They can be productive, but 'in any case they are
creative', equivalent to Barad on '"cutting
together – apart"'. This is different from a
critique, and not like a practice in STS
['"sociotechnical integration"'] where a
researcher becomes embedded in practices in order
to intervene and disrupt the flow of things, by
making practitioners aware of social dimensions].
Diffractive methodologies do not critique or
correct a workflow but 'open up new spaces in
which differences can interfere' (29).
Barad themself has done diffractive reading across
Bohr, Butler on performativirty, and Foucault on
power and apparatus [the staff on Foucault shows
the limits of interdisciplinary readings without
much knowledge]. She claims this is '"respectful
engagements"'. Artists and other cross
disciplinary collaborators have also
enthusiastically taken up diffraction, as in
Geerts and van der Tuin ( 2016) [Rhizomes
piece]. It is not just crossing disciplinary
boundaries but looking for shifting circumstances
and interference patterns. Not just cross
disciplinary collaborations which maintain
disciplinary practices, but something transcending
those norms, often focusing on real world
problems. A diffractive approach focuses
particularly on how boundaries between disciplines
are 'enacted, maintained and re enacted'. They may
not contribute knowledge to their own discipline
but rather contribute an understanding of
differences and therefore shift the practice of
their field.
A case study of a long term arts science
collaboration between Robinson and Rundle, the
RADIX network [which includes her] [Rundle
works at UOP!]. The radix in question is an
aquatic snail and the project explores
developmental biology, evolution and climate
change. Rundle looks at changes induced by the
environment among snails and others in estuaries
and intertidal zones and how it affects the
development, especially in terms of key changes in
their life history like hatching, settlement and
maturation, which are all affected by
environmental conditions. The timing of these
transitions varies within a species and therefore
there might be species variations to climate
change, concerning heart development or reactions
to oxygen limitations. Robinson uses 'metaphorical
and material lenses' that 'isolate capture and
engender an object of scientific investigation and
how artistic interventions may reveal assumptions
about the processes of creating visual data in
science' (30). She is particularly interested in
'unthought or "unconscious" structures' in
scientific knowledge production, and does things
like drawing on surrealism to evoke repressed
undersides of scientific knowledge like mind-body
or nature-culture divisions.
The joint projects explore borders and interfaces
between science and art, tensions between
aesthetic decision-making and scientific method.
They generate artwork that interrogates and adds
critical dimensions to scientific practice and
also generates new perspectives and insights. The
claim is that 'the diffraction of artistic and
scientific practices may render visible what
science either left invisible more labours to
hide' (31). [pretty modest visibilities]
Specific projects have been produced, including a
sound installation translating visual data from
video recordings of developing snail embryos into
sound producing 'an immersive experience that drew
attention to the sensory body of the observer'
usually ignored by scientific experimentation.
This calls attention to the relation between
scientists and the animals they observed and the
'"messiness" of the natural environment and the
process of data collection'.
Other projects work with visual representations.
One 'reconfigures temporalities… And demonstrates
the process of diffraction both literally (through
the generation of ripples in the liquid contained
in a petri dish) and metaphorically through the
interference of science and arts'. All seek to
immerse the viewer , make observation tangible,
and draw attention to relations between humans and
nonhumans.
The snail has become a model organism to study
survival under altered environmental conditions
and Rundle has gone on to get interested in
intra-species variations due to climate change.
The animals are convenient for laboratory study
because they reproduce rapidly and their embryos
are transparent. Schrader thinks the whole thing
has been a great success refocusing attention on
observation, despite 'allegedly objective science'
trying to raise these processes, and also
emphasising 'processes of creative transformation'
(32) [real talk up in my view — do the
observations actually transform the results in any
way?]
Another video installation on the development of
the embryos. This time there are scientific images
following rigourous protocols following
bio-imaging observations covering particular time
lapses digital processing and so on, but this
footage is then appropriated and put into a
different context, images are placed on the
surface of dark liquid, and the image [the liquid]
is disturbed physically, enlarged and projected
onto a wall. This 'artistic interference renders
visible the interferences within experimental
observations' (33), illustrating '"uncertainties
in the space between the boundaries of science and
art"' (33).
There is a commentary by Rundle, other artists,
philosophers of science in literary scholars [the
real significance of the work I assume], which
point out the visibility of the process of
observation, the challenge to transparency and the
conceptual challenges to the notion of ideal
development: there is apparently a tension in
developmental biology 'between idealised images of
embryos and… "Natural" variation' [who knew?].
Some variations of particular organs for example
are biologically important part are often
suppressed an overall representation 'as only the
most beautiful embryos are chosen… In scientific
representations' [according to Rundle]. The
aesthetic conventions found even in scientific
methodology 'may undermine its own process of
discovery. Further, 'selection of images helps it
to be 'easily overlooked that heterochrony that is
usually associated with a phenomenon between
species, defined as an "altered timing of the
expression of the developmental stage or event
between ancestral and descendant species", could
also be significant within a species' [again as a
result of selecting particular images?] So what is
revealed is the 'relevance of aesthetic components
and conventions in science' — but presumably all
this is conveyed in the commentary?].
Another commentary by an artist looks at the idea
of transparency, implied in the visual
transposition of the video recordings into
time-lapse re-presentations. Transparency usually
suggests a mimetic relation, while diffraction
shifts this relation and re-entangles observer an
object. The installation sifts attention from
knowledge production back from individual embryos
to the process of life formation of the embryo,
because it offers 'temporal manipulations that
foreground the agency of the snail embryos' (34).
The time-lapse technology adjusts or condenses the
development of the embryo makes it fit the
attention span of the human viewer.
In another visualisation the enlarged diffracted
image projected on the wall [same as the one
above?] disrupts the video sequence. Another
temporal sequence is superimposed on the actual [?
Or human adjusted?] developmental time, especially
'an impression of pulsation', which redirects
attention back to the 'pulsation of the embryo
heart' what we have here is 'the superposition
of two temporalities' which 'enables a shift
in the relation between the viewer and the object
of observation [not all superposition in the
quantum sense, more like superimposition?].
Knowledge of developmental growth 'is backgrounded
in favour of an experience of a lively pulsation'
[an artistic effect]. Scientific manipulation of
development 'is not raised but highlighted as
manipulation such that viewers can insert
themselves into the temporal lapses' [viewers can
realise that scientists are manipulating the
development in between the images?]. This makes
visible the apparatus of scientific production
'and a specific materialisation of time'. Or, in
Baradian talk-up 'human – snail relations are "cut
together apart"… Differently in time'. Back into
ordinary language — 'noise interferes with the
signal but noise can also become the ground from
which nourishment [or creativity] can be gleaned'
[is it though, and would it be without the
commentary?].
So we have a wonderful movement across
disciplinary boundaries, representing both being
transposed and the act of transposing,
simultaneously and this crossing of positions
between the disciplines 'is both disruptive and
connective. Diffraction is at work… As a
deconstruction of mimesis or transparency (in
Haraway's sense) and across the disciplines
interferences that engender new phenomena (in
Barad's sense)' (34 – 35). We see 'new generative
spaces of indeterminacy between science and arts
[maybe, but only because the artistic depictions
do not conform to the normal literal scientific
depictions. It is hardly rocket science].
Yet another project involves a scientific
experiment in an art gallery, an installation.
Glass containers were filled with water, snails
and plants, pondweed, as food for the snails. The
snails were drawn from different locations with
different salinities. The jars are connected by
wires and illuminated by LEDs where the light
corresponds to the salinity. a fourth jar acts as
control and reference ['normal' links between
water and the LED] . This set up 'literalises the
notion of experimental control' (35) [again there
is an artists account for those who don't get it]
which is not normally made visible. The ethical
concerns also 'take on new dimensions in a
gallery'. Viewers participate in monitoring,
'provoked to move between aesthetic and a
scientific gaze' which are set up to interfere and
destabilise each other. [They tweak the snails
then empathise with them?] There is a sound
accompaniment, a text by Linnaeus of his early own
fieldwork on the snail, and two versions scrambled
by an algorithm. Linnaeus's visit describes the
connection between the laboratory experiment and
the field, but the scrambling 'destroys any
illusion of a pure origin' (36) [weird]. Overall
the artist thinks this depicts the essence of an
experiment, revealing the mechanism of laboratory
experiments that are often repressed, a way to
identify '"fissures within an experimental system
that can then be open to further reflective
artistic investigation"'. The normal pattern of
mimicry is displaced, but Schrader finds 'the
notion of diffraction a better fit' because
playful mimesis can make visible what was supposed
to remain invisible, while diffraction amplifies
that which is covered up by focusing on
interference patterns. [contradictions for the
audience to puzzle out?]. The whole setup, the
gallery, the emphasis on control, the controlled
participation of the viewers and the connection
between the apparatus, and the joining of accounts
of fieldwork and laboratory 'diffract the
scientific experiment in such a way that it
increases the amplitude of those scientific
aspects — such as the importance of context, the
parameters that bind and control in experiments,
experimental noise — that are downplayed in the
scientific world'. The creative processes remain
visible, including the apparatuses of observation
which remain 'visible through the diffraction of
the gazes' [massive talk up again, with an
admission that diffraction is not much more than
playful mimicry, and diffraction of gazes still
not well explained, and more or less just means
alternative gazes?].
In conclusion [thank God] these cross disciplinary
practices reveal and interrogate methodologies and
how they position specific bodies of knowledge but
in these projects 'art functions as a "diffraction
grating" for science' that is, like Barad,
'"instruments that produce patterns that marked
differences in the relative characters (i.e.
amplitude and phase) of individual waves as they
combine"' [2007). They tell us that sometimes the
point is to understand the substance that is being
diffracted and sometimes to learn about the
diffraction grating itself [2007 p. 83] [and this
is supposed to be helpful?] Diffraction patterns
acquired different meanings in the frameworks of
science and art. Temporal diffraction generates
new temporal experiences by exposing the
artificiality of the construction of time[?}
in experimentation. It also shifts the relations
between viewer and object of observation 'through
the superposition of different times' [I
still think she means superimposition]. Temporal
variations are visible and amplified. Unlike
mimesis 'diffractions draw attention to nonhuman
agencies in the process' [no, the commentaries
do]. So interference patterns make a difference in
how meanings are made and lived [a paraphrase of
Haraway].
[Note 6 says that heterochrony involves '"an
altered timing of the expression of a
developmental stage or event between ancestral and
descendant species"'. Choosing a single image to
represent developmental stages can miss this or
confuse it with timing differences within species.
(37)
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