Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Fusing the potentials of online democracy and community building, Intuition Commons visualizes overlooked and underrepresented stories of mentorship, influence, and reciprocal generosity through user-generated creative contributions. The coded ‘scatter’ of the site avoids a central author, as community “is not the space of the egos-subjects and substances that are at bottom immortal-but of the I’s who are always others” (Jean-Luc Nancy, 1990). The work was created in reaction to hosting “Wikipedia” edit-a-thons wherein the collaborative spirit was exciting -but the perpetuation of legitimizing references was antithetical to ways a community offers, inspires, contributes, communicates and produces. Intuition Commons (2019) is a pedagogical work that enacts hooks’ performative and relational coming to know oneself via knowledge accessed through deep networks of human relationships (2003). Users are encouraged to contribute their own perspectives and accounts, creating a rhizomatic web of nuance and overlapping stories. Demonstrating complexity of Agamben’s inaccessible and radically unknowable communication of “singularities as an attribute that does not unite them in essence, but scatters them in existence” (1990), the site emphasizes effects granted by other perspectives showing a process of difference differing (Haraway 2008) and facilitate Barad’s concept of “intra-action” to understand agency as a “dynamism of forces”(2007) rather than belonging to a sole element.