Complementary Situations // ANY BODY THERE // To Mind is To Matter
Summary
This thesis offers a transdisciplinary account of embodiment, through incorporating curatorial practice and artistic research into this topic via documentation of its accompanying event ANY BODY THERE. It rounds this off with a new materialist reading of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, offering this philosophical treatment of the main question alongside the artistic research. The two legs of this thesis van be read diffractively through one another, but the theory resists being read as a mere interpretation of the event and vice versa.
The documentation of ANY BODY THERE covers the history of its convergence, as well as showing a few pictures of the event itself. The work that the author presents within the context of the exhibition is also traced back to its source in the history of ophthalmology, as it ties together a feminist critique of visual metaphorics in epistemology with an appeal to transdisciplinary knowledge-making.
The theoretical leg of the thesis, To Mind is To Matter, argues for a Baradian reading of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Not only on the grounds that Barad and Merleau-Ponty share a wealth of philosophical presuppositions, but also that the philosophical projects of both authors as identified in the thesis could be furthered by a diffractive reading of the the one through the other.