A Venture into the Realm of the Nonhuman—or How Artistic Performative Methods Can Propose a Practice of Exchanging Knowledge with Matter

This chapter investigates the vitality of matter and inquires if and how artistic performative methods can catalyze the agency of the nonhuman. The departure point is a performative method developed by the artist duo J&K that attempts to exchange knowledge with a range of nonhuman entities of organic, inorganic, and artificial origin. Along the lines of new materialist and posthumanist theories, the chapter as well as the artistic practice, explore whether nonhuman matter, besides having an immanent vitality (Bennett), even pertains to reflective and discursive properties. (Barad) This is a supposition that calls for the essential question of whether the ontology of material agency is merely an anthropomorphic fabrication, or if matter and meaning are reversible agents that produce each other in a discursive metabolism. (Barad, Merleau-Ponty) The chapter suggests approaching these questions with a practice that sets out to venture beyond human realms of perception by using the imagination to make the leap into the imperceptible.