Ally Bisshop

This practice-based research proposes thresholding techniques as a contribution to processual artistic practices. It argues that such practices engage matter not as readymade form, but as a flux of creative becomings, active within compositional processes. Following Henri Bergson, it proposes that such becomings are ‘more-than-human’, habitually eliding ‘human’ perception. This project engages process-based philosophy and process as ways of encountering matter’s movements, through and beyond human ‘subjects’ and material ‘objects’.

Through this research, it develops an image of the threshold as the field through which ‘bodies’ are linked and elaborated, via matter’s creative becomings. The investigation of these concepts engages Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s artistic process of research-creation, where the intersection of thinking and doing is a generative threshold for the invention of techniques. Through artistic experimentation, it proposes four thresholding techniques for composing in relation to material-force, and for opening on to more-than-human experience.

These techniques are developed in concert with an analysis of those at work in artistic praxes engaging process as compositional force: Pierre Huyghe; Nina Canell; Olafur Eliasson; Senselab (space for collective research-creation).

Pausing~displacing proposes a technique for expanding the interval of duration, and accessing the more-than-human rhythms that it fields. It is elaborated through my initial multimodal sculptural experiments that slow and attend to different temporalities. Holding~circling proposes a technique for thresholding the tensions between framing/deframing. It emerges from sculptural and performative experiments in framing the event of sunset, and opening onto its more-than-human thresholds. Feeling~following proposes an intuitive engagement with matter’s more-than-human movements. This technique emerges across sculptural/installation works that follow material lures for composing. Through further sculptural and textual experiments, swelling~spilling is proposed as a technique for amplifying the virtual potentials of material-forces within experiential thresholds, and making their difference felt.

Thresholding techniques offer artistic propositions for becoming- sensitive to material becomings, such that matter is understood as creative force. They therefore articulate an ethics that situates the creative act as emergent from the relational threshold. This project proposes a new understanding of processual practice as a mode of encountering more-than-human material becomings, and contributes research-creation techniques for engaging this relational threshold.

In the locked-down Spring and Summer of 2021, the noisy societies of house sparrows who take up seasonal residence on my apartment balcony were displaced by one lonely and territorial male. I named this sparrow Volker — because it's a German name and I live in Berlin, but also because of its resonances with 'vocal' and 'volk' [people]: a nod to the passerine communities that he spent each day loudly signalling, and whose bodies and songs happily plaited the branches of the trees below.

Watching him from the unbearable familiarity of my living room, I couldn't determine whether Volker was actively summoning his sparrow kin or warning them away. As Volker's loneliness persisted, his agitation grew. His calls became louder [and tonally aggressive, at least to my emotionally labile ears] — shrieked from the balcony balustrade toward the sparrow collectives below, who kept a convivial distance.

Volker was in distress, I decided. The ritournelle (Deleuze and Guattari 312) he sounded was too rigid and hermetic; if his songs enunciated a social territory, then it was one ringed by vibratory walls of exclusion. But then, what if Volker was signalling refusal; an incantation of resistance in a performance that also gave him creative agency (Despret "Secret Agents" 42-44)? What aspects of avian desire, joy and subjective expression are missed by speciated and mechanistic readings of birdsong and behaviour? What kinds of relation do such readings foreclose?

This essay-as-epistolary is an exercise in thinking-with Volker: about desire, expression, and relation. Desire displaces mechanism in this ethological story — the nonhuman desire habitually excluded from scientific accounts of Volker's behaviour and semiotics, and my own desires to make relations [and make sense] with him. This essay also thinks [with Volker] about the possibilities and limits of making relations across thresholds of difference [human/bird]: the kind of ethical considerations difference demands, and how difference itself can be a lure for relation — particularly for making relations otherwise.

This article explores the death/life ecologies that flourish along the queered axes of spider reproductive behaviours – from cannibalistic sex to matricidal birth – and how the language and concepts used to describe these behaviours both reflect and distort heteronormative human accounts of gender/sex, life/death and thresholds between. It recalibrates storied accounts of spider sex, life and death through a critical, creative posthumanist approach to nonhuman life as zoē (Braidotti). It presents a queered reading of spider ethologies in which death is not life’s programmatic terminus, but another zoētic expression of desire: the endless reaching for affirmative becomings through (re)productive comminglings of bodies – whether by penetration, modulation, ingestion, or absorption. It argues how a spiderly weaving together of sex and death effects the conditions for the creative survival (inherence) of life itself. This zoētic analysis of spider ethologies proposes a novel figuration: the arachnomad – a sensuous assemblage of spider, web, affects and tangents – as a material model and heuristic for understanding nomadic subjectivities, and for queering the life/death relation.

Excerpt from 2018 artist book, Possible vehicles for time travel.

There’s time, and there’s duration.
The extensive and the intensive, the measurable and the incalculable.
The one and the many.
A bifurcation in terms and implied meaning between the two terms, symbolically performed by an old argument between the physicist Albert Einstein, and the philosopher Henri Bergson.
As the story is told, either Bergson lost the argument, or Einstein won it – a subtle differentiation, but one whose terms rest on the means and style of argumentation, rather than the essential truth or provability of the argument itself.
To be fair, it has always been hard to argue philosophy over calculus. Socratics proceeds by logic and proof, after all.
Besides, time doesn’t carry wins or losses.
It carries only change.

MARBLE is a lyrical re-telling of the life of marble, commissioned within the Lost Rocks (2017–21) series. Lost Rocks is an ambitious, slow-publishing artwork – a library of forty books, four books published twice yearly over five years. Brought to life by Australian artists Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward (A Published Event) and composed by forty contemporary artists from around the world, Lost Rocks is an accumulative event of mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical telling.

Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions, Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions and the Cosmic Dust Web Orchestra are pioneering and visionary projects by artist Tomás Saraceno that fold his long-term research on spider webs into the realm of vibration and sound, to develop playful and experimental systems for interspecies communication. Working at the intersection of art, architecture and science, for these projects Saraceno transformed spider webs into musical instruments that play upon the incredible structural and mechanical properties of spider silk, and also tune into the spider’s sophisticated forms of vibrational communication. Exhibited at Saraceno’s first solo show in SE-Asia at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore, Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions was developed in collaboration with experts from various fields of knowledge—and extends upon Saraceno’s earlier bioacoustic projects. With this interdisciplinary team, Saraceno created a musical system for translating the spiders’ vibrations into acoustic rhythms: amplifying the spiders’ biotremological signals and web pluckings, and making these substrate-borne vibrations audible to humans. During the exhibition, musicians and sonic artists were invited to attune and respond to the spiders’ vibrational signals through the multispecies instruments that Saraceno created via three live performances (jam sessions), creating a collective and immersive interspecific orchestral composition. The exhibition space was thus transformed into an interactive sound and visual installation: a process-driven laboratory for experimentation that pushed the boundaries of interspecies communication. During the First International Symposium on Biotremology in San Michele all’Adige, sonic excerpts from Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions were played to a scientific audience.

This paper explores some affective, mythopoetic and speculative possibilities for interspecies communication with invertebrate animals via artistic mediations of encounters with web-building spiders. Specifically, it examines speculative forays into human-spider communication extending from artist Tomás Saraceno's interdisciplinary Arachnophilia research: the spider jam sessions or human-spider concerts, and the arachnomancy or spider divination project. Spiders are abject figures of nonhuman otherness that index a relation to alterity; their queer behaviours, morphologies and sensorium underscore a seemingly impassable species and ontological divide – challenging the possibility of human-spider relation, let alone communication. This paper traces how sensory and affective attunements across thresholds of difference offer alternative frameworks for imagining ‘communication’ with creatures like spiders (and other invertebrates) with whom we do not share language, scales, temporalities, sensory capacities.
To think with, communicate with, invertebrate animals is a necessarily speculative endeavour. In investigating Saraceno’s speculative human-spider mediations, this paper traces their mythopoetic dimensions—how these experiments enrol worlding praxes that move between art, science and fabulation to offer propositions for thinking interspecies communication. Analysis of Saraceno’s artworks offers two alluring and overlapping propositions for affectively and radically mediating species and relational thresholds: vibration and divination; both of which are read as ‘techniques’ for producing shared knowledge at the blurred boundaries between reality and fiction, between seemingly non-communicating perceptual worlds. In turn, these techniques work to ‘radically mediate’ encounters with invertebrate others, opening up a relational threshold that does not simply link pre-existing bodies, but which produces and transforms human and nonhuman subjects in the generative event of their meeting. Saraceno’s interspecies encounters are theorised as mythopoetic interventions that aim at drawing forth the nonhuman within the human, and locating possibilities for attunement, resonance and ‘collective enunciation’ within.

Presented as part of the panel on 'More-than-human sensing' for the 2021 conference, 'Other(ing) Sensing. Practices, Politics and Ethics of Sensitive Media' at the University of Potsdam, Germany.
Unpublished working paper.

This paper experiments with a lyrical format to think through the task of making more-than-human sense, and to explore the work and promise of creative and speculative techniques in going above "the [human] turn of experience". 1 It begins in the fluid middle: the membrane on which sense is written, a threshold where relations and possibilities emerge and dissolve. In the interests of keeping things fluid, I've framed it as a story, of a kind; fictioning being one way-one technique-for mobilising the possibilities of sensing otherwise, and for folding a more-than-human sensitivity forward into the creation of something new. In the telling, this hybrid story embeds some propositions for a generative praxis of sensing across thresholds of difference-of sensing-with and sensing-otherwise-in which difference or otherness becomes an affective lure for experimenting with the thresholds in experience. It also attempts to attend to the ethical responsibilities and reciprocities implied by attempts at more-than-human sensing; that is, to ask: what can more-than-human sensing do?

Nowhere is the porous threshold that interpolates life into death more tangible than in reproductive behaviours that embed the bodily mortality of their actants at the same time as they seek to extend those bodies in replicated biological code. This paper explores the death/life ecologies that flourish along the queered axes of spider reproductive behaviours—from cannibalistic sex to matricidal birth—and how the affective language and concepts through which these behaviours are understood both reflect and distort heteronormative human accounts of gender/sex, life/death. Our understanding of this behaviour is underwritten by accounts of spider sex roles that borrow from anthropomorphic gender tropes: the disinterested/passive female, the active/performative male, the deceptive conceit of the sexual lure. These accounts are buoyed by popular media narratives, supported by scientific observation, and, as has been argued, written into scientific practice and theory in ways that ‘naturalize’ misogynistic conceptions of gender/sexual relations and violence. Implied in spider sex stories is the thrill of possible death, in which mortality becomes both eroticized and biologically rationalized. The teleological outcome of ‘reproductive sex’—generation of spider progeny—also embeds a deathly caution: potential cannibalism of the mother by her children, overwritten in scientific and popular accounts as an altruistic act of ‘maternal self-sacrifice’. This paper seeks to recalibrate storied accounts of spider death rites through a critical, creative posthumanist approach to nonhuman life as zoë (Braidotti). It presents a queered reading of fatal arachnid narratives of sex/birth in which death is not violence or programmatic terminus, but a zoëtic expression of desire as conatus: endlessly reaching for affirmative becomings through (re)productive cominglings of bodies—whether by penetration, modulation, ingestion, absorption. A spiderly weaving together of sex and death thus effects the conditions for the creative survival (inherence) of life itself.

I present a proposition for thinking-through-making that asks, What if we consider the threshold as a framework for experimenting with the indeterminacy that arises between thought and action, between philosophy and art practice? I propose that the threshold allows us to understand processual artistic practices whose modes of composition are sensitive to the affective power of material-forces: the flows and movements of matter-rather than matter-form. I follow this proposition through with an example of open, material artworks created using a threshold technique of feeling-following material.

The Anthropocene addresses us: it compels us to re-think how we—as researchers from fields of anthropology, geography, philosophy, and the arts—carry out investigations in the world. In this essay, we propose forms of creative experiments and play as a way to follow the life of materials. Such an endeavor is part of a particular ontological commitment to new ways of knowing in the Anthropocene. This contribution is a statement of purpose for radically interdisciplinary modes of research, which emerged from a series of animated conversations about creative experimentation at the Anthropocene Campus.

The archetype of the spider is that of the predatory carnivore. Collectively, spiders consume almost a billion tonnes of animal protein per year, which even the rapacious, libidinal rhythms of human industrial agricultural cycles cannot match. The vegetarian spider Bagheera kiplingi, who feeds almost exclusively on acacia plant proteins, introduces a ripple into the pond of this trophic equilibrium. As this spider shifts from insect predator to plant forager, its intra-species relational rhythms also drift-from solitary and territorial modes of relation toward new modes of quasi-social cohabitation. Might changing our nutritional ecologies offer alternative pathways to more equitable forms of multispecies sociality?

Essay prepared on behalf of the Arachnophilia community for the event, "How to hear the universe in a spider's web? A New Year's Eve Concert for Invertebrate Rights" presented by artist Tomás Saraceno on New Year's Eve 2020, with the support of Festa Di Roma. See www.arachnophilia.net

On a July night in Berlin in 2019, Lucy Powell and Ally Bisshop gathered together an assemblage of plants known colloquially and quite gloriously as the ‘Queen of the Night’. Their Latin scientific name is Epiphyllum oxypetalum. E. oxypetalum blooms once a year, and for one night only – its beautiful, pale and heavily perfumed flowers wilting before the break of dawn. The plant has other names: Orchid Cactus, the Night-Blooming Cereus, Gekka Bijin - meaning ‘Beauty under the Moon’ in Japanese. As she lures our worship and admiration, so we chose to bestow upon her the title of Queen.

The genus name, Epiphyllum, translates from the Greek as ‘upon the leaf ’. Upon the leaf is where the journey of this elusive flower begins, and ends. The Queen of the Night plant is cultivated from and passed between human caretakers through leaf clippings, which are then pressed hopefully into the soil. The flowers for which this plant is prized grow from stems that themselves resemble leaves. Flower upon leaf upon leaf upon leaf upon flower.

The plants assembled for this specific encounter were all cultivated from the leaves of a single plant body. They were clones, plant bodies that also express the impossibility of absolute mimesis – each plant performatively expressing its difference from the other, in the curl of its limbs, the drape of its leaves. Life proceeds through such differentiations.