Breathing Art into life

Abstract

What is the political role that artistic practices, characterised for their use of new media and interdisciplinarity play today? How is the political constructed in societies where relationships are always mediated, capitalism reins uncontested and the borders between high and low culture no longer exist? These questions frame the investigation undertaken in this study. Through a philosophical reading of contemporary artistic practices, this study proposes a Deleuzian understanding of art’s efficacy that feeds from the dynamism and conceptual challenge that the terms becoming, deterritorializations and rhizomes enable in a social critique. The study couples this philosophical perspective with the pragmatism and relative simplicity found in Actor-Network-Theory (ANT). ANT’s methodological advantages mean that complex interconnections surrounding the political are opened, in turn rediscovering a series of socioeconomic realities. ANT allows too, for a shared argument to be traced across distinct social spheres and to propose an original perspective on creativity and its effectuation in the creative industries. The study’s methodological choices allows it to bring together, without the need for oversimplification or metaphysical reductions, what at first glance appears as diverse and unrelated phenomena: craftsmanship, relational art, economic development, marketing practices and digital media. In analysing a diversity of human and nonhuman actors, the political role of art is rediscovered, underpinned by the notions of Intermediality and Intermedial Art. The study concludes Intermedial artistic practices constitute a specific and specifiable construction of creativity that disrupts social practices, changing their purpose, their consequences and the ability of actors involved to collaborate and collectively envision unique modes of existence.