Experimental Practices – serie

Narrating Life explores the relationship between literature, science and the arts and the way in which they are informed by the process of narrating life. More specifically, it asks: how do literature, science and the arts affect and are affected by the emergence of a critical culture of biopolitics and its rhetorical figurations? Its topicality for literary and cultural studies lies therefore in its exploration of the question: to what extent could narratives of life (or life-writing) be understood as a special practice through which to access the contemporary discussion about biopolitics with its strategies of immunity, mutation, and contagion. The individual contributions address these questions through focusing on new forms of life writing in traditional and new media, science writing and artistic and critical creative practice. In doing so, they also explore and redraw the boundaries between fictional and factual experimental practices.Contributors: Amelie Björck, Elisabeth Friis, Holly Henry, Stefan Herbrechter, Tom Idema, Moritz Ingwersen, Cristina Iuli, Tanja Nusser, Angela Rawlings, Manuela Rossini, Dorion Sagan, Laura Shackelford, Amalie Smith, Marianne Sommer, Steve Tomasula, David Wagner, Jeff Wallace, Dominik Zechner.

Magic Science Religion explores surprising intersections among the three meaning-making and world-making practices named in the title. Through colorful examples, the book reveals circuitous ways that social, cultural and natural systems connect, enabling real kinds of magic to operate. Among the many case studies are accounts of how an eighteenth-century actor gave his audience goosebumps; how painters, poets, and pool sharks use nonlinearity in working their magics; how the first vertebrates gained consciousness; how plants fine-tuned human color vision; and the necessarily magical element of activism that builds on the conviction that "another future is possible" while working to push self-fulfilling prophecy into political action.

Moving beyond the neurohype of recent decades, this book introduces the concept of worlding as a new way to understand the inherent entanglement of brains/minds with their worldly environments, cultural practices, and social contexts. Case studies ranging from film, literature, music, and dance to pedagogy, historical trauma, and present-day discourses of mindfulness investigate how brains are worlded in an active interplay of biological, cognitive, and socio-discursive factors. Combining scholarly work with personal accounts of neurodiversity and essays by artists reflecting on their practical engagement with cognition, Worlding the Brain makes a case for the distinctive role of the humanities and arts in the study of brains and cognition and explores novel forms interdisciplinarity.

Experimental Practices in Interdisciplinary Art presents the work of contemporary artists who are committed to experimenting in the marginal areas where artmaking, practice-based research, and scholarship intersect. Some work in laboratory settings, some in studios, and some in wild landscapes or abandoned buildings. But all are committed to interrogating the way that art is created and positioned in a culture that continues to marginalize artists working across disciplinary boundaries. Their projects range from inquiries into the way surveillance technologies are used to reinforce power structures to collaboratories that help us to re-envision our relationship with the natural world and with each other. In reflecting on their wide-ranging explorations and unusual methods, these unique artists provide fruitful insights for bringing creativity to bear on issues of public import.