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Summer Ontology Conference
Artifacts
Stephanie Springgay
www.thepedagogicalimpulse.com
www.artistsoupkitchen.com
www.walkinglab.org
What are the top five questions/obsessions/visionary hopes/productive doubts/topics that
currently occupy your contemplations about research?
Can we retain the concepts from qualitative research such as interviewing, observation, or data
collection? What might these ‘methods’ look like from a materialist perspective? Is that even possible?
Or, do we think materially from the outset?
If methods, both pedagogically and in research, enable an evaluation process, which can be
extracted from the event itself, how might we envision procedures as a ‘more than;’ a tending
toward the enactive? The question then is, how is a materialist, vitalist, posthuman procedure?
In thinking about research procedurally, we might ask questions not about what do we archive or
collect, but what do we take with us into the next procedure or the next event-making? What
tentativeness opens for research is a shift from “this is this” or “here this is” towards “what’s going
on? What is it for? What do I do with it?” Not in an instrumental way, but in an ecological or coextensive way.
What does it mean to challenge all-encompassing representation? How do we ‘represent’ the
edginess of ‘data’—the very event that resists representation? How can an ‘image’ perform its
materiality? How am I co-composed at the limit of this image?
How can recent discussions of zootechnologies or swarms, while resisting methods of analytical
investigation, offer new ways of thinking about collectivity and political subjectivity that is
ontogenetic, indeterminate, and of an ‘ecology’ in co-composition?
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List five books/articles/performances/installations/experiences that have been very
useful to your recent thinking about the conference themes?

Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Philosophical and artistic explorations of movement, choreography, faciality, and processoriented research. She draws on Deleuze, Deleuze and Guattari, Whitehead and Simondon.

Coleman, R. & Ringrose, J. (Eds.) (2013). Deleuze and research methodologies. Edinburgh,
UK: Edinburgh University Press.
Useful for teaching; and for introducing concepts to students.

Gins, M. & Arakawa. (2006). Making dying illegal. New York, NY: Roof Books.
Gins and Arakawa write about procedurality, technicities, and special-temporal movement. Their
work has greatly influenced how I have been thinking about research apparatuses (ie. cameras
etc).

Diane Borsato. Your Temper, My Weather. Performance, Fall 2013.
http://dianeborsato.net/projects/your-temper-my-weather/
One hundred regional beekeepers performed a
collective meditation in the AGO’s Walker Court.
While exploring the tangible effect of collective
meditation, the work created a public platform upon
which to reflect on the health and temper of bees
and their keepers, and on the policies and
environmental conditions that affect our shared
future. The work featured periods of guided silent
meditation, walking meditation, and sonic
accompaniment.
Her work materializes theoretical concepts like touch, fleshiness, materiality, affect, sensation,
movement, swarming, becoming-animal, becoming-earth.

Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling. The Beaver Mat & The Faggot Shack. June 2014.
http://beavermatandfaggotshack.tumblr.com/
http://www.reheardregalement.com/
The Beaver Mat & The Faggot Shack was a temporary gay bar created in Nida, Lithuania. It
featured two survivalist shelters outlined in 1914 book for boy scouts called Shelters, Shacks, and
Shanties: The Classic Guide to Building Wilderness Shelters, The ‘Beaver Mat’ and the ‘Faggot Shack.’
These low-impact structures are assembled from faggots; loosely bundled sticks held together
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with twine. Faggot, of course, has another connotation, one
that is often associated with a state of “unnaturalness” and
“abnormality.” As well, a beaver is slang for a woman’s
bush. These alternative readings expand the function of DC
Beard’s shelters and display how our own inclinations are
packed with us into the wild. Through this process we
ruminate on queers as pioneers, wilderness inhabitants and
more-than-human locals of rural areas. The Beaver Mat &
The Faggot Shack challenges the damaging (and dominant)
pairing of straightness with naturalness, through a
celebration of the infinite number of possible natures.
Reed and Jickling’s projects connect with a number of the readings and thinking around feminist
new materialism.
What are five questions you would like to pose to fellow participants at the conference?
(These may be directed to specific persons, disciplinary groups, or to all participants.)
1. How did you get here?
2. What counts as an art experience?
3. Where does art happen?
4. How long does an artwork have to last to be permanent? How long can an artwork last and still
be ephemeral?
5. You are going on a 3 hour walk in the forest. What 3 ‘things’ would you want to bring with you?
What intersections of two (or more) categories of the conference readings are you finding
most compelling and why?
New feminist materialism and Indigenous studies.
Can you provide five key words you would like to see and hear less of in fields of social
inquiry?
a/r/togtraphy
data collection
method(s)
interpretation
participation or participatory
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implications
knowledge mobilization
Can you provide five key words you would like to see and hear more of in fields of social
inquiry?
research-creation
movement-sensation
technicity
procedural architecture
composition
approximate-rigorous abstractions
procedural architectures holding in place
diagramming
pure-edging
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