preliminary reflections on artistic research
Weiyi Chang
Collective reading constituted a vital part of Soft Turns’ residency at Gallery 44. Over 18 months, the artists have generously hosted a series of reading groups, Thinking through the milieu, inviting the public to take part in their research process and to contribute their own knowledge, interests and concerns.1 Since its inception, the reading group has drawn a semi-regular audience of thinkers and collaborators, who have demonstrated not only a critical engagement with the readings but also with the fluid, indeterminate and sometimes circuitous process of artistic research.
This essay began as an attempt to synthesize, as an attendee, several discrete themes that have arisen over the course of the reading group and their social, ethical and cultural implications: the Expanded Mind theory of cognition; cognitive hierarchies and their role as arbiters of moral status; the moral and ethical status of more-than-human objects and creatures; recent theories of plant ethics vis-a-vis the concept of flourishing. Underlying these thematics emerged a set of questions: What repercussions might the Extended Mind theory bear on the moral status of more-than-human entities insofar as they constitute a part of a cognitive system? On what grounds might a more-than-human entity be said to possess moral status, other than cognitive grounds? Is it possible to develop a non-hierarchical, internally cohesive ethical theory that is cognitively agnostic? And how might redefining the grounds of our moral obligations towards more-than-human entities lend itself to a radical rethinking of our relationships with each other, with the creatures with whom we coexist, with the very land and waters we inhabit?