Utterance and Authorship in Dialogic Art: or An Account of a Barcamp in Response to the Question, ‘What is Dialogic Art?’

The written aspect of this practice-based thesis ‘collates’ a one-day event exploring the question, ‘What is dialogic art?’ into a textual account. The practical aspect threads through this account, with reference to its dissemination elsewhere made frequently.

The event ‘documented’ here is a ‘barcamp’, a kind of ‘unconference’ that combines presentations with responsive discussion. This barcamp brings together practitioners of art, activism, education, philosophy, sociology, sociolinguistics, literary theory and criticism, and others to explore dialogic art through a dialogue that moves amongst their respective points of view.

The barcamp’s collation tracks the contributors’ discursive struggle to co-author dialogic art as a dialogue-based approach to contemporary art practice. ‘The dialogic’ that qualifies this art accretes through the barcamp as an artistic disposition preoccupied with the constitutive agency of dialogue, understood here in an expanded sense. This disposition explores the myriad relations that preoccupy authorship qua authorship. These include the material and conceptual thresholds organising creative agents and their cultural production: participation and collaboration, process and outcome, the author and the authored.

The epistemological foundation of this barcamp can be defined as dialogic because it understands knowledge as arising from social relations and enacted through intersubjective exchange. Similarly, the ontological basis for this project issues from a post-structuralist sense of subjectivity as simultaneously dispersed and multiple, distributed amongst authors. These philosophical perspectives underpin the theory of subjectivity evolved through dialogic art. This theory recommends the art’s authors as ‘responsive subjects’—artist-agents who are themselves reciprocally authored through their artistic practice. This reciprocal authorship explodes the twin myths of the independent artistauthor and the discrete artwork without abandoning the facticity of their historical existence. Always contingent, dialogic artworks and their artist-agents are presented in this project as polyphonic portraits of heterogeneous becoming achieved through dialogic exchange.