Gilbert Simondon's Ecumenicism and the Transdisciplinary Shadow

This presentation explores an aspect of art practice’s contribution to transdisciplinary collaboration. I will view this as an ideal aspiration which in practice encounters material obstacles and resolutions. I will draw on three main sources: Gilbert Simondon’s idea of the aesthetic as the “ecumenicism of thought”, Jean Francois Lyotard’s notion of differend and my collaborative experience within a network of artists and archaeologists.

In sketching out the ecumenical perspective and the differend I wish to advance a material and technical landscape and identify this region as a transdisciplinary shadow formed as an imprint of control and restricted deployment – the contour of a Foucauldian dispositif, an apparatus – a biopolitical question and as such a method that, in encountering its own failure to achieve holistic or unified knowledge, does not however encounter its own redundancy.