Relational Aesthetics

Smudging Relational Aesthetics

We are drawn to what Bourriard and others have called "relational aesthetics." The way it has been defined embodies a number of aspects of our practice. However we are moving beyond the terms and definitions already circulating about this movement of the '90s. We still feel that what we experience and make is "relational" and "aesthetic." But we are defining and practicing these terms differently.

We experience and practice relational aesthetics as:

The world is filled with forces in play--not just human, but also all that is animate and inanimate.
As we practice it, relational aesthetics is a delicate, responsive, co-creative making in accord with forces in play.

"Relational"

not premeditated
ephemeral
responsive
exposure to
extending towards
leaving traces

"Aesthetic"

transformative
delicate balance
aliveness
change
surprise/unexpected
life-force

Practicing Relational Aesthetics

we insert materials and audiences/bodies directly
and intensely
into contexts
and events
exposing physical materialities of meeting and being met …
. . .by impressing surfaces/skins/landscapes/objects/movements/colors onto or through one another
both altering surfaces and preserving their singularities of context and material


to release audiences’ potentials to live in relation to each other
and the world
in ways never before experienced . . .
. . .ways that are immanent but remain captured


as invitation to pass through aesthetic experiences
that offer the felt reality of relation
and that invite invention of new modes of social relation in response


modes in which social relationality becomes an aesthetic experience
of meeting and being met without obliterating
not towards common goal
not as collectivity
not dictating where it goes
coming together for temporary time and then responding from elsewhere
not to give up individuality. . .
. . . but rather to make collaboration without collectivity
without sameness
and then living differently in response
smudge studio


relational aesthetics
a form of life creating forms of art

proposing as artworks moments of sociability,
objects producing sociability,
and relational contexts

meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality, in a word all manner of encounter and relational invention

the exploration of relations between … may determine forms and a project

attitudes become forms, and we should now realize that forms prompt models of sociability

a set of tasks carried out beside or beneath the real economic system, so as to patiently re-stitch the relational fabric

asking: how can a meeting between two realities alter them bilaterally?

cohabitation

interstices

… inventing ways of being together, forms of interaction that go beyond the inevitability of the families, ghettos of technological user-friendliness, and collective institutions on offer.

the most pressing thing … is the freeing up of inter-human communications

. . . excerpts from "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicolas Bourriaud