Sympoietic Sketching of Phenomena in Flux

Large scale natural phenomena such as earthquakes, storms and bushfire hover at the edge of human perception and appear almost sentient in their capacity to shape-shift and morph, as they envelop terrains and evade human’s urgent responses. Sophisticated scientific modelling and analysis is able to rationalise such phenomena, but it doesn’t capture their almost-human dynamics. We explore this hybrid space of phenomena, as a strange coalescence of material performances and human affective and imaginative registers. The work is grounded in spatial practices of drawing, focussing on the architectural sketch. The sketch’s open, ‘non-totalizing’ capacity (Nancy, 2013: 1), to draw impressions of space without fully fixing them, is directed toward natural phenomena. We expand the irresolute capacity of the sketch through installations composed of sculptural objects, virtual environments and spatial sound. These are used to capture phenomena as an anthropo-natural hybrid space, blending human imagination, technology, matter and other-than-human forces: In these installations, spatial ‘blurrings’ map to the imagination of ungraspable, peripheral characteristics in phenomena. To date two mixed-media installations have explored this agenda, drawing presences from the geology and dramatic seismic activity of Aotearoa New Zealand. These operate as immersive drawings, prompting visceral witnessing of open, unfixed, sketched phenomena. We reflect on this previous work and present a work-in-progress: a sketch of large-scale bushfire phenomena. The key concept that informs the work is sympoiēsis, or ‘making together’, a way to re-think the entangled relations between human and other-than-human actants (Harraway, 2016:4). The expanded sketch gives us a way of merging artistic research practices, where the agency of matter – material and digital - ties to thought. In our creative practice, we are interested in how matter pushes back, how sketches can be sympoiētic, ‘made together’ by human thought and action in concert with other-than human forces.