Interdisciplinary Encounters 2020

October 3 to December 1^st, 2020

Sympoietics: The Sharing of Agency and Autonomy

The title of the first edition of Hexagram’s Interdisciplinary Summit refers to the neologism created by the Canadian Beth Dempster (1998) which she invented as an alternative to urban planning analysis centered on the concept of autopoiesis. The symposium is conceived under this key concept of distribution and sharing, as elaborated further by Donna Haraway (2016): the autonomous subject is a fiction, autonomy, like agency elsewhere, only exists by, with and in the sharing between multiple forces, materialities, processes and entities, human and other-than-human. Sympoietic processes are expressed in collaborations, relations and co-extensions.

The practical organization of the symposium will itself be sympoietic, a pooling of interests between the organizers, publics and participants (academics and artists) to share the risk. In this way, the digital platform proposes to go beyond dissemination by adopting participatory methods. As many others have expressed, it is difficult for us to endorse the idea that “social distancing” is the key to curbing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is therefore necessary and urgent to invent new ways of practicing social solidarity, even though human physical distancing is imposed on all (and rightly so).

Potentially between two waves of the virus, and therefore two confinements, we propose to create once more in these troubled and troubling interstices along with other actants of the planet. In confinement, a large part of activities is expressed digitally: this pandemic is also an informational pandemic. Today, therefore, the emphasis is on the co-extension and sharing of agency and autonomy along with new modalities where digital expressions are not a reduced, impoverished version of “real” life. We don’t consider the digital as underscoring analogue modes of existence. Indeed, the virtual can push us towards quite different actualizations.

Theis page is a copy of the digital platform, produced jointly by the production team, participants and publics, is a full-fledged research-creation project. Their posture was eminently practico-reflexive: to reflect collectively on the sharing of autonomy in action, to practice the sharing of autonomy and of agency, social solidarity and research in action.

The central research question is expressed as follows: how can the current context – including the pandemic happening in the era of the said Anthropocene – allow for experimentations of the sharing of autonomy and agency ?