a proposal-in-progress for an artistic research project
subject matter
self-technologies for a relational world
Hi, I'm Gijs➪. There's this question I keep encountering, each time in a different guise. On my journey from design to philosophy to artistic research, I often resonated with circles that challenge the position of the human subject, and try to make space for excluded human and non-human others. But I worry that these efforts may not go deep enough as long as the dominant self-conception, the idea of what it even means to be a human subject, is left untouched. What even allowed for the conception of a self that can be separated from others in the first place? And that's when I meet the familiar question.
Why? Introduction
I'm looking at how our subjectivity, as a sense of our role in the world, is shaped by designed things around us. How driving a car makes me feel like a king of the road, how trying on clothing make me see myself as an artwork, how chatting with a bot makes me feel more or less human. In other words, how any technology is also a self-technology➪. But what selves are made?
I want to study how technologies currently hinder and could instead support a transition to a relational self-conception, one where we view ourselves as the product of a context as much as the producers of it, and act accordingly. How has design been producing the modern subject, and could it produce relational ones? 'Self-technologies for a relational world.'
How? I'd like to engage in an artistic research project: using creative ways of knowing to explore ways of using design, aesthetics, and other material conditions to invite a relational self-conception. I just don't know yet what would be a good place➪ to do this research, one where I can find academic peers. But first I'll explain a bit more about the topic➪ and methods➪.
What? Self-technologies
With the term 'self-technology' I propose a lens to analyse the way that any technology also affects our self-conception. I think this happens both in explicit and implicit ways. There are many historical examples of explicit self-technologies: from mandalas, temple architecture and spiritual rituals, to figurines, self-portraits and psycho-analytical diagrams. Each a technique of framing and working on the self in a particular way.
When new technologies are introduced they often start acting as accidental self-technologies: they come to influence how we relate to what it means to be human. The steam engine became a template for the working human, the computer for the thinking human, the internet for communities. In that vein, could generative AI, as a model of intelligence based on a large dataset, become a model of the relational creative self?
I'm interested in exploring the different dimensions and aspects of how self-technologies mediate our self-relation. How matter shapes the subject. Could there be a practice of explicit self-design? Of including the self-forming aspects of a technology in the design brief? Or would that exaggerate the power of design in such ontological matter? Still, if this mediation is happening, what to do?
How? Artistic research methods
I like to do research through artistic and auto-ethnographic practice.
When I moved from philosophy to an artistic design MA, I felt liberated in the ways of knowing that I could engage in. I was still responding to philosophical questions, but by making things and taking my bodily experiences seriously. E.g. exploring the reflexive potential of AI through a self-portrait, understanding different ways of winning trust by performing them, capturing nature-views in window videos.I see this form of artistic research as the practical implication of a relational epistemology: one that allows to work with subjective, aesthetic, and embodied ways of knowing. This is in line with methods in practice-based research, auto-ethnography, research-through-design, and the emergence of artistic PhDs. See for instance The Auto-Ethnographic Turn in Design.
Especially when researching how things affect self-conceptions, these methods of working with materiality and myself as a site for research are helpful. They will allow me first-hand experience of the how things affect my subjectivity, ways to alter existing things or make new ones, and ways of finding patterns between things beyond what can be articulated textually. How to research subjectivity and materiality? Through subjectivity and materiality.
So, to research self-technologies I'd like to make maps, essays, objects, video works, host workshops. Not just as a way to represent knowledge, but to create it.
Think of:- Websites as mappings, to gather and analyse instances of things. For instance, in gijs.garden I collect care tools, things related to plantcare, mapped on how they affect how much control and engagement takes place.
- Essays, as ways of finding patterns between different registers of references, and to think ways out of conceptual tensions. E.g. Between Fox Traps and Hero Bait was a visual essay exploring what design discourse could learn from the ambigutity of emerging types of memes.
- Visual speculations, ways of world-making through aesthetics. E.g. the Post-Growth Compass critically explores possible futures for a thinktank on human-technology-nature relations.
- Object I can interact and live with and other material experiments, for instance with Objective Portrait, a self-portrait with a self-trained reflexive AI model. Or the ATM and Free Money wallets.
- Performative talks and videos, both as a way to structure findings in a narrative and to play and test ideas through the aestetics and roles of how I present. See for instance: How to win trust in stormy weather?
- Workshops as ways of learning together. In teaching I try out methods of critique through complicity in Hypocrits, self-portraiture as a positioning tool in Ego Design, and AI as a reflexive tool in Objective Portraiture
I work best through artistic media, but I also miss academia
, a community of people being passionate about studying shared questions. The artistic works form the primary research to be analysed and contextualised through theoretical and critical lenses, to be able to contribute with new theoretical concepts and frameworks.Where? Academic context
In the quest for finding a place to do this research, I have two main questions:
1. What would be a fitting academic field and discipline to situate this research within?
- critical posthumanism in the humanities, where I could build upon Rosi Braidotti's theories with an account of the subject formation on an individual level.
- postphenomenology in philosophy of technology, where I could focus on the mediation (Peter-Paul Verbeek) of the reflexive self-relation, in line with my philosophy thesis on 'metamediation'.
- ontological design in design studies, supplementing the ontological shaping of the world with how things may shape ontologies, the way people understand the world.
- ontological design in cultural studies, supplementing the ontological shaping of the world with how things may shape ontologies, the way people understand the world.
- philosophical transdisplinarity in artistic research contexts
- ecological humanities
- ?
2. What would be an interesting academic field to bring in to inspire and support the artistic methods?
- philosophical anthropology, for a view of different models and practices of subjectivication.
- neuro-archeology, to understand the role of artifacts like cosmograms and self-depictions in the development of subjectivities, like Lambros Malafouris on the influence of beads on self-awareness.
- technological psychoanalysis, to support the analysis of subject formation, (for instance Isabel Millar's psychoanalysis of AI)
- societal geology, for a broader materialist understanding of how certain roles in relation to our natural environment came into being, in line with Manuel Delanda's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.
- cultural studies, for ways that aesthetics and subjectivies intersect, for instances through subcultures or phenomena like the dandy.
- decolonial studies to help recognise non-Western modes of subjectivity, like in Sylvia Wynter's genre's of being human and Rolando Vazquez decolonial aesthetics.
I would like to find out what would be fitting fields to focus on through conversations with people in those fields.
I noe picture a kind of hybrid artistic PhD with a humanities and art department. I'm open to have this take on different shapes, but for now I'd like to have chat to see if you or someone you know could be interested to collaborate.
Who? About Gijs
I'm Gijs de Boer, an artistic researcher and educator based in Rotterdam, NL.
I combine a background in philosophy and design to study how aesthetics and materiality affect the idea of self.
How do the things we use often make us feel like masters of the universe kind of subjects, and how could they make us feel humble and entangled instead? I like to explore these questions through videos, visuals, essays, websites, focusing on a theme like the design of trust, artistic positioning, or care relations.In my practice I deal with inherited modernism.
As someone born in the post-industrial city of Eindhoven – the self-proclaimed Brainport, center of innovation, and Design Capital of the Benelux – I feel like I grew up with modernism and tech-optimism running through my veins. As a smart and male kid, I've come to know the desire for control, for independence, for overview all too well – every time I feel overwhelmed, stressed or threathened. I read my practice as a way of dealing with these inherited modernist desires in a relational world.How to unlearn modernist subjectivity? What else to do with those desire apart from suppress them? What has lead me to even think and believe myself separable and independent? How to organise caring and trusting subjects instead?
I use the self as a site of research: how do I embody my conditions, how do I respond when I change those?
I see such methods as practicing what I preach: a form of research that is embodied and situated,that take affects, feels, desires, fears, aesthetics, expressions as seriously as concepts, frameworks, arguments, and critique.This results in videos, essays, workshops, websites. Some examples:
If AI is always a mirror of its makers, how could it help a maker reflect on their work? (Objective Portrait). How can the trust design not hide its tactics and still be trustworthy? (The Shine of Money) How can design discourse learn from the complexity of new memes? (Between Fox Traps and Hero Bait) How can acknowledging your complicity make critique more empathic, deep, and accessible? (Hypocrits) How can care tools invite not a controlling relation but a negotiation of desires? (Care Tools).I've worked within artistic and academic contexts.
I've studied MSC in Philosophy of Science Technology and Society, and an MA Contextual Design from Design Academy Eindhoven.I currently teach at MA Critical Inquiry Lab of Design Academy Eindhoven, and am part of Extra Practice.
I've presented work at Dutch Design Week, Economia Festival, Sandberg Institute; collaborated with Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Technologie, Today Art Foundation; published essays in Robida Magazine, Designo, C Magazine, and academically I worked on papers for DIS and CHI. Here you can find my CV and portfolio, and you can call me or email me.