This practice led PhD thesis proposes the method of Interleaving Practices
as an approach to interdisciplinary work around art and science. In my art
practice, artists work alongside science and other disciplines; they try to do
what scientists do, copying their practice, re-empractising. Disciplines are
not bridged seamlessly as if epistemologically flat, no impossible consensus is
arrived at or antagonistic borders erased. Interleaving is supported by what
I call ‘Critical Kits’ a term developed with art collective Re-Dock. Making these kits fold-in electronic components, documentation and raw materials, but also things normally unacknowledged, historical material traces, care, social relations, model organisms, supply chains, games and feelings. They also fold-in exclusions, externalities and political commitments. These kits are not art objects but by-products convivial to novel coalitions.
Making critical kits as participant observers reveals how diverse practices
stick together but stay separate; that interact, but without synthesis; they
interleave with each other without erasing difference. Like the multi-species
collaborative labour of leavening bread Interleaving Practices is a generous
strategic method for art and science work in precarious worlds.
Interleaving Practices responds to calls for slower methods of knowledge
production that consider the politics of affect and care. It contributes to
critique and praxis in technoscientific making in the fields of art, ‘art-science’,
social science, and science and technology studies (STS). Making as Interleaving
Practitioners, means research participants, artists, makers and scientists get
their hands dirty, sticky and wet and reveal how their practices offer already
existing critical spaces with rich opportunities for learning. Interleaving
Practices not only contribute to interdisciplinary collaboration and inventive
social science, but challenge practitioners in these fields to include and be
transformed by an embodied politics of care, critique, intervention and struggle.
