Listening to Animalities, Materialities and Shipwrecks

In these collaborative, theoretical and performative pieces our aim is towards radical expansions of various formal parameters in western philosophy through art praxis that de-centres the roles played by the animal subject, industrial technologies, and soil in modernist paradigms. Exceeding these conventions demands pushing against/past blockages (aporias) to broader engagement with whatever refigured subjectivities are called into constellative gathering in the process. The immanent multiplicity of constellative (Soilogic) analysis ‘cuts in all directions’ in its insistence on attempting to ‘upend’ multiple disciplines simultaneously rather than remaining mere cross-disciplinary embellishment between art and philosophy. Opening new ruptures in horizons of interpretation and maintaining them through artistic and philosophical agitation involves a ‘fidelity to the impossible’ (Young), and a reach beyond the known and tried. It is also a reach towards a blurring of Techne and poeisis in the inter(fur)faces of Dawn (a dark Horse), Gladys (a Goat), and the debris field of the zeppelin USS Macon that crashed into the ocean and sank off the coast of Monterey, CA in 1935. Initially we did so by painting portraits of Nietzsche and Benjamin on Dawn, putting them into conversation with each other on the question of Animality. We then attempted to make ‘haptic’ contact with the Macon while posing performative questions about interrelations, telepathies and hauntings among Animalities, Techne and more-than-humanist Materialities.