Afterlives for Clemens

To reach the afterlife one has to die first. OK that’s a bit dramatic. But it matters how we think of finishing a work, and seeing the thing gain a life of its own, getting into some fresh entanglemess of its own making, being no longer under the makers’ control, if it ever was. Maybe finishing the thing is more like a birth, and making was gestation.

Many formats of working suggest a clear boundary between finished ‘product’ and independent life. The launch, the publication, the deadline. (is there life after deadline?)

Here the arts and sciences seem to imagine things differently: sciences seek to set in stone, to plastinate the soil profile into a fixed, legible but utterly dead composition. The publication is not supposed to be ambiguous, traces of its makers would taint the truth claims. Maybe a positionality statement is included in more progressive social sciences, but more to preempt critique than add to bringing the work to life? [this is questionable yes]

![[soil sciences.webp]]

Thinking of how the thing will perform once unleashed into the world will inform the making obviously. What others do we presume to resonate with. what frictions do we prepare for?

When the aim of the thing is 'giving to the situation the power to make us think' (Stengers Ecology of Practice p185), the thinking is not meant to be over and fixed in the product, the deliverable.

The thing in arts/sciences is both fixed, bounded, identifiable as an intervention, but also meant to rake up, to gather [https://hal.science/hal-02057240 ], to rile up, to connect, to resonate. It is meant more as an opening, a conversation piece, without being completely open and fluid, plastic and malleable, but suggesting directions, staging experience, offering space for complexity to encounter and preparing thought in particular ways. Offering the ground for [hashtag] unexpected surprises (are there suspected surprises one may ask - yes, those are less exciting presumably)

New challenges emerge for the artsscientist. Does one stick around to explain, to protect from critique, to adapt? Or do we need to gently push the work off in a wicker basket to go down with the flow and fend for itself and make its own adventures?

What is the script the thing brings? Is the nature of the outcome meant as an atlas, then the audience gets to be in the position of ‘explorer’ - https://feralatlas.org/.