Cutting through with Curiosity: A posthuman consideration of how inquiring subjectivity emerges in artistic research. 

Curiosity has long been perceived as a critical, immanent, and creative virtue. In particular, the anthropocentricity of some kinds of curiosity has been employed as a rhetoric to justify the elevation in the value of human currency, making human identities analogous to curiosity itself. But ancient and recent research in curiosity studies but also cognition and posthumanities, demonstrates a contradiction to the immanent quality of curiosity, positing that curiosity is praxiological (practiced) (Zurn and Shankar 2020). Furthermore, the call to posthuman worlds has also attracted attention to the curiosity of non and more-than-human species, asking researchers to attune to multi-species knowledge-making practices and gestures. A particular kind of more-than-human curiosity is found in artistic research methods.

Aligning with Marshall McLuhan’s seminal essay ‘Understanding Media’ which considers media and technology as extensions of the human, thereby becoming extensions of ‘our’ behaviour, I aim to present the practice of three artists for whom personal curiosity through the body is closely entangled with that of the materials they work with – Dries Verhoeven and his queer world-making process through glass, Jeanine van Berkel and clay as a historical-social matter, and Nany Dayanne and cloth as a sheathing and unveiling world. Through this, I would like to diffract the different ways in which the particularity of the material along with the human de-centres human curiosity, at the same time makes way for new gestures of curiosity, desire, and knowledge-making. While departing from critical media studies, this paper focuses on the topic of identity through questions concerning the body as material flows, its gestures, and movements when considered as a posthuman phenomenon. In that I seek to answer – what are the processes of praxiological and transversal curiosity beyond individual and collective capacities and how does it reconfigure anthropocentric notions of curious endeavours?

This research is in continuation to broader inquiries which stem from the fields of corporeal literacy, nomadic subjectivity, and artistic research methodologies. Following, in part, the research conducted by Prof. Dr. Maaike Bleeker, Director of Research in the Media, Art, and Performance Studies program at Utrecht University, my past and ongoing academic as well as artistic research examines questions concerning the body, its shifting contours in contemporary conditions, its perceptive and communicative capacities, and its relationship to the environment it inhabits. My current PhD research zooms in on the gestures, conditions, and potential of the body that could contribute to the development of the concept of curiosity.

Keywords: Curiosity, Posthumanism, Artistic Research, Materials, Eco-anthropology