Interleaving Practices and Critical Kits

Dalziel, Ross and Southern, Jen and Dillon, Roderick and Coulton, Paul (2023) Interleaving Practices and Critical Kits. PhD thesis, Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts.

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Abstract

This practice led PhD thesis proposes the method of Interleaving Practices as an approach to interdisciplinary work around art and science. In my art practice, artists work alongside science and other disciplines; they try to do what scientists do, copying their practice, re-empractising. Disciplines are not bridged seamlessly as if epistemologically flat, no impossible consensus is arrived at or antagonistic borders erased. Interleaving is supported by what I call ‘Critical Kits’ a term developed with art collective Re-Dock. Making these kits fold-in electronic components, documentation and raw materials, but also things normally unacknowledged, historical material traces, care, social relations, model organisms, supply chains, games and feelings. They also fold-in exclusions, externalities and political commitments. These kits are not art objects but by-products convivial to novel coalitions. Making critical kits as participant observers reveals how diverse practices stick together but stay separate; that interact, but without synthesis; they interleave with each other without erasing difference. Like the multi-species collaborative labour of leavening bread Interleaving Practices is a generous strategic method for art and science work in precarious worlds. Interleaving Practices responds to calls for slower methods of knowledge production that consider the politics of affect and care. It contributes to critique and praxis in technoscientific making in the fields of art, ‘art-science’, social science, and science and technology studies (STS). Making as Interleaving Practitioners, means research participants, artists, makers and scientists get their hands dirty, sticky and wet and reveal how their practices offer already existing critical spaces with rich opportunities for learning. Interleaving Practices not only contribute to interdisciplinary collaboration and inventive social science, but challenge practitioners in these fields to include and be transformed by an embodied politics of care, critique, intervention and struggle.