Mari
- Name: Mari Bastashevski
- Affiliation: Visual Artist and a Postdoc at Wageningen University Cult Geo Group
Procedural starting point
The way I described my methods or process in my last funding application was: My most recent funding application was connected to NWO, and I have also participated in several Horizon application rounds. I find the process cumbersome and often centered on #jargon, #oversimplifications, and impossible promises, rather than on the value and overall #cohesion of intellectual ideas. Taken too seriously, it can quickly resemble a kind of humiliation ritual. When writing proposals for both art and academic grants, I aim for clarity and authenticity. I prefer to avoid formulaic grant language, unrealistic promises, and managerial persuasion. This often means relying on external editorial support to reshape my proposals so they fit the required model. That said, I use application deadlines as a way to initiate new projects and distill ideas. The #work_begins_regardless, and even #without_funding, something of value emerges from the process. Many colleagues experience rejection as emotionally taxing. I do not take it personally. However, I find that meetings connected to large funding applications are often excessively oriented toward anticipating what might #please_the_funder, rather than engaging with the actual content of the proposed project. This can feel draining and uninspiring. One notable development is the way academic funding programs have begun to #adopt_vocabulary of art and artistic research, while excluding artists and any reflection on the extensive theoretical and practical histories behind these terms. Adding artists to diverse academic research projects has become a part of reinventing European universities. Most of the time such initiatives position artists as amplifiers of scientific developments, rather than equally compelling authors of their own. At the same time artists struggle when it comes to making distinction between scientific developments and their application, in particular in regard to novel technologies. In part, because the reasons behind such developments are either not sufficiently legible outside the very niche communities dedicated to specific projects or are actually too complex. This however is a recent movement with a short memory. Art and science collaboration share a long history of influence when it comes to process and discovery, and even which questions are worth asking in the first place. The new institutional language of "collaboration" tends to obscure rather than lead with this, placing academic science as the more elite #site_of_knowledge_production and #art_as_its_synthetic_arm for the outreach. The work that i feel is worth doing leads with a theory that a coordinated #encounter between two, art and science, each taken seriously on its own terms, produces the type of knowledge neither can arrive at, in isolation.
What I actually did was / what I usually do is: I would say my actual method of working is more rigorously organized around #meaning, #process, #attention_to_detail, modes of #collaboration, and value of ideas #concepts and projects to different other projects and people across disciplines. It is geared towards #discovery (including that of interesting questions) over #solutionism. I also take history of #aesthetics and the ethics of aesthetics a bit more seriously than it’s commonly warranted in academic discourse. The challenge is to keep being open, where the working conditions (of scarcity) persuade us to compete against each other at every turn.
Recently I am becoming interested in organizing art and science around the use of a model. What do I mean by a model? A model here would mean some form of a structured material form that draws on and re-arranges specific targets from existing realities in order to produce a multifold #proposition for addressing a problem. The #model becomes the center of the collaborative process and a way to handle, test, and re-imagine the nature of the problem being examined across different modes of interpretation.
Drawing on #Michael_Weisberg’s theory of working and speculative models, and models as forms of world-making, as well as #Isabelle_Stengers’s writing on epistemological breaks, I would love to pair up with people in a project to trace how the use of models has and continues to produce insight across disciplines.
My previous experience between 'academic' and 'artistic' work:
I have had an active art practice since 2009 and I have held various academic positions for most of that time until the present.I have had an active art practice since 2009 and I have held various academic positions for most of that time until the present. I honestly could not tell you where one ends and another begins.
I finished my Ph.D. in 2024, in the Architecture and Design department at a Norwegian university. During that time I was a guest researcher at the Amsterdam School of #Cultural_Analysis, ran a winter school that led to some exhibitions and a book, did an exchange year at an architecture atelier in Lausanne, and taught a seminar in Amsterdam. Before that I spent nearly ten years doing #field_research and #counter-forensic work, a lot of it around how technology shapes the scale and pace of #modern_conflict, always alongside academic work, such as fellowships at a few research institutes in New Haven, New York, and London. My early background is in art, film, and media studies, and studying philosophy with Reza Negarestani in 2019 pulled me toward #philosophy_of_science, the #temporal politics of technology, and #using_models as a way of connecting art, ecological science, and design. Broadly speaking, my early work was focused on how #technology reshaped and reorganised the modern conflict to cut across #ideological_binaries and how the #platform_economy integrated image to #instrumentalize the representation of others in favor of conflict economies. My more recent work, drawing on models and concepts articulated by Isabelle Stengers, Bernard Stiegler, Alfred North Whitehead, Lorraine Daston, Vinciane Despret, among others, has evolved into #designing_virtual_environments and #designing_processes that reorganize the #hierarchies_of_knowledge that place the human above the animal, and the animal equal to or above the machine. So what I can and love to contribute to project I guess is a kind of bridge-building between these different languages and the things people are working on in these areas, and negotiation of meaning across these registers. At the same time, while my disciplinary fluency is broad the range of actual topics i have a knowledge of is project-specific that is to say, far from…encyclopedic.
