Bücher der Reihe Immediations

In Ways of Following, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi offers rare, intimate access to artists' studios and exhibitions, where art processes thrive in their material-relational becoming. The book argues for an ethical and affirmative mode of engaging with contemporary art that replaces critical distance with sensuous and transformative proximity. From writing-with to dancing and breathing, from conversations to modelling, Kontturi maps ways of following that make the moving materiality of art intensively felt. Drawing on long-term engagements with selected contemporary artists and their art-in-process, Kontturi expands the concept and practice of collaboration from human interactions to working with, and between, materials. With this shift, Ways of Following radically rethinks such core tenets of art theory as intention, artistic influences and the autonomy of art, bringing new urgency to the work of art and its political capacity to propose new ways of being and thinking.

What might an interactive artwork look like that enabled greater expressive potential for all of the components of the event? How can we radically shift our idea of interactivity towards an ecological conception of the term, emphasising the generation of complex relation over the stability of objects and subjects? Gathering Ecologies explores this ethical and political shift in thinking, examining the creative potential of differential relations through key concepts from the philosophies of A.N. Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon and Michel Serres. Utilising detailed examinations of work by artists such as Lygia Clark, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Nathaniel Stern and Joyce Hinterding, the book discusses the creative potential of movement, perception and sensation, interfacing, sound and generative algorithmic design to tune an event towards the conditions of its own ecological emergence.