Knill’s Magic 2.o:  Underworlding War and WaterIntroductionConflict shatters infrastructure, yet seldom extinguishes the human impulse to play. Across time and geographies, children and adults have answered artillery, rising seas, and bureaucratic paralysis with improvised stages, lantern festivals, augmented‑reality portals, and whispering drones. This paper traces that stubborn aesthetic metabolism from a World War II cellar on the Swiss–German frontier, recalled by expressive‑arts pioneer Paolo J. Knill, to contemporary workshops in Rafah, Port Vila, Qelekuro, Jenin, Kherson, and beyond.  By reading Knill’s “Magic Underworld” alongside digital and climate‑era counterparts, the study argues that communal art‑making functions as a mobile shelter in which logistical attunement, technological fragility, and collective imagination converge to restore psychosocial bandwidth. Within that shelter three analytic lenses crystallise: distributed rehearsal (the fragile yet repeatable interval in which participants pace catastrophe and rehearse alternative tempos), infrastructural doubleness (the oscillation that lets one scaffold survival and imagination at once), and durational poetics (the stretching of creative gestures so meaning accrues through repetition rather than climax). The genealogy of these ideas begins in Knill’s Rhine‑side cellar, a site children converted from bunker, to theatre by password, and puppet (Knill, 2011).The argument unfolds through five braided movements, each tightening the claim that art may be flimsy in matter yet tensile in consequence. It opens in Knill’s cellar, reading the puppet theatre as an early instance of distributed rehearsal. It then turns to the algorithmic choke‑points and battery economies that contour artistic risk in Gaza, Khartoum, Suva, and Nairobi, where infrastructural doubleness becomes a critical lens. A third passage lingers in the Pacific, where canoe flotillas and virtual‑reality lagoons practise durational poetics across tide cycles and visa ballots. A fourth section inhabits failure itself, treating power cuts, and false content flags as fertile disruptions that widen the range of play. The final movement addresses facilitation, arguing that tomorrow’s practitioners will need anatomical precision, voltage diplomacy, and what one refugee artist calls paper choreography: the capacity to fold compliance spreadsheets until they resemble lived experience.Humid AfternoonsOn a humid afternoon in April  2025, in the rehabilitation ward of Deir al‑Balah’s Al‑Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, ten‑year‑old Ilaf al‑Samak lifted a scratched virtual‑reality visor to her brow and waited for the aquarium‑blue loading screen to steady. The headset, printed on a camp‑side 3‑D rig and wired to a donated Android, opened TechMed’s gait‑training program. Coral and parrot‑fish shimmered whenever she shifted weight from heel to toe. Ilaf, silent since the shrapnel wounds that ended her childhood football games, rose. Aquamarine pixels fanned out across the cracked floor tiles like a living path. A nurse began clapping in time, and cousins struck the bedframes for percussion. A physiotherapist murmured “follow the reef, habibti.” Someone filmed. The seventy‑second clip reached X before midnight, and by sunrise UNESCO’s Youth for Hope desk had folded it into a briefing on trauma‑responsive rehabilitation (2025). This exemplifies distributed rehearsal because the reef‑path lets Ilaf rehearse a future gait inside present danger.Forty‑one months earlier and ten thousand kilometres away, a dawn fog drifted over New York’s East River as students from the University of the South Pacific unrolled a lime‑green tarpaulin across the deck of a borrowed sloop. They traced Lady Justice, replaced her scales with a stylised globe, and spray‑painted VAKA 4 ICJ above the outline, invoking the ocean‑going canoe as both vessel and legal compass. By noon the flotilla, including canoes, kayaks, one outrigger bright with reef‑fish glyphs, slipped beneath the Manhattan Bridge. Banners snapped salt spray toward the glass façade of United Nations headquarters while office workers pressed against windows. Reuters called the sail‑by “a surreal moment” of Pacific jurisprudence on the Hudson (Volcovici, 2022), and the campaign’s own communique, posted that evening by Pacific  Islands Students  Fighting  Climate Change, framed the river passage as an acte de présence, proof that their islands’ jurisprudence could cut through metropolitan glare (Prasad, 2022). This exemplifies durational poetics because a single canoe score accrues legal weight through serial repetition across oceans.Elsewhere, in Kharkiv’s Historicheska  Muzei metro station, musicians from a shelled‑out conservatory rosined their bows beneath vaulted concrete. On March 26, 2022 they opened KharkivMusicFest precisely on schedule. The stage had a yellow safety line. The audience huddled on blankets and the sounds of Bach and a children’s choir lifted the rendition of “Shchedryk” into the subterranean dusk. Each overtone trembled fluorescent bulbs, turning a civil‑defence bunker into something like a church nave. One toddler crawled forward with a paper sunflower, and the choir rewrote its coda around the rustle of petals. The Washington Post later described the event as a “concert between explosions” that let listeners breathe differently for half an hour (Kornfield & Suliman, 2022). This scene exemplifies distributed rehearsal because music scripts a timed corridor of safety without pausing the bombardment.Three crises, three continents, one through‑line: when familiar worlds fracture into projectile, paperwork, or siren, the young will still hunt for portals, whether of pixel reef, river canvas, or subway chord, inviting the rest of us to follow. Across a hospital ward, a canoe flotilla, and a subway nave, we see the same grammar: danger is neither ignored nor postponed. It is bracketed by timed, repeatable play. Distributed rehearsal therefore converts terror into tempo, letting agency surface long enough for policy or breath to adjust. Knill recalls how the cellar of his wartime Swiss village morphed, in children’s hands, into what he later named a “Magic Underworld”. It was a bunker and theatre at once, equal parts evacuation drill and carnival (Knill, 2011). Contemporary projects keep rehearsing the same conversion. The Phoenix of Gaza XR collective has stitched salvaged 360‑degree camera footage into walk‑through virtual scenes that now tour universities, allowing visitors to wander bomb‑scarred streets inside a headset and to sense rubble as portal rather than endpoint (Dellis, 2025). Here infrastructural doubleness manifests when salvaged 360‑footage turns destroyed streets into walkable data. Farther west, the exhibition Fire Transforms at the Palo Alto Art Center gathered California wildfire survivors who sifted ash and char into photographs and sculptures, framing trauma as material rather than debris (Nayyar, 2022). Here infrastructural doubleness appears as ash becomes pigment, toggling loss into tactile archive.The sensibility binding these scenes is old, while the interfaces are unmistakably new. Where Knill’s cohort scavenged material for marionette limbs, today’s displaced adolescents download code snippets from open‑source repositories, side‑load sketch apps onto repurposed phones, and nurse battery life through chains of power banks topped up on improvised solar mats. Art making has seldom been more technologically fragile, yet it has never travelled so widely. Salvaged cameras, ash pigment, bureaucratic prose, VR wetlands: each case pivots between scarce matter and abundant code. Infrastructural doubleness is thus less a medium than a hinge. It reveals that every platform rests on an unstable floor, and artists learn to dance on both layers at once. To see what is meant by distributed rehearsal, we can listen to Knill himself. He remembers how that alchemy first took shape beneath a different sky:  They lived on Swiss territory on the German side of the Rhine during World War 2. The  neighborhood was a mixture of German NSPD members working on the German  “Reichsbahn” (Hitler’s Railway) under the Swastika, and Swiss citizens partially  organized underground, preparing for a possible guerilla activity in an occupation by  Nazi Germany. The Swiss Army has given up on this undefendable small territory. The  tension and anxiety were high, and neither side dared to act out the conflict, fearing a  later retribution. The kids we will focus on were between 7 and 13 years old. As the oldest  of them, I remember that the relationships between those kids under the swastika were ominous. Restrictions had not been explained to us, and when we had some fun together, it was  “talked away” by parents. The confusion reached its peak when the bombardments by  the Allied forces started. The humming silver flocks of bombers crossed the blue sky,  suddenly planting “Silver Christmas Trees” in the blue, and each time shortly after the  earth shook like an earthquake. We rejoiced and they panicked, until they hit us for the  first time, still with almost no damage. From that moment on, strong air‑raid alarm rules  were put in effect, and more and more time was spent in the improvised air‑raid  shelters, which every household had to build. (2011, p. 53)Three features of that scene anchors a framework: first, the bunker doubles as a stage, prefiguring the mobile shelters that follow; second, the long‑running puppet saga provides a repeatable temporal bracket (the rehearsal itself); third, the shared password acts as a low‑tech access protocol, an analogue precursor to the QR codes and battery chains traced later in this paper.Professional humanitarian writing has, for roughly two decades, moved back and forth between the upbeat notion of “bounce‑back” resilience and a more sober recognition that some wounds never close (Department for International Development [DFID], 2011; IFRC, 2016). Levees can wash away again before engineers arrive, and a truce may lapse before roof beams are lifted. When volunteer doctors rotate out, the trauma clinic can collapse back into a tent. In that churn, the very word community loses fixity. Kin networks scatter across time zones, kept in touch by prepaid SIM cards and compressed voice notes rather than courtyard gossip (UNHCR, 2016; GSMA, 2022; Forced Migration Review, 2024).Art programs that aim to shift conflict dynamics must therefore navigate both physical dispersal and algorithmic congestion. A mural started on a Khartoum shelter wall, for example, is often photographed and posted to WhatsApp groups where diaspora relatives suggest new captions or Nubian‑Arabic spellings. The same images circulate under hashtags that knit Sudanese organisers and supporters across several continents (Elmileik & Khalil, 2019; Murray, 2020). What emerges is no longer a tidy warmup for a later plenary but a distributed rehearsal in which speech, image and code cross pollinate like fungal spores riding high winds.The notion of decentering, as a step outside a conflict’s chokehold, survives. Today, however, the corridor is threaded through fibre‑optic cables and patrolled by algorithms that neither participants nor facilitators fully understand. Human Rights Watch documented more than one thousand peaceful pro‑Palestinian posts that Meta’s automated systems removed or buried in just eight weeks of late‑2023 fighting, confirming that opaque filters can silence users without warning (Human Rights Watch, 2023). A European‑Parliament study adds that such classifiers are statistical and fallible, that false positives are inherent, and redress procedures are often weak (Sartor & Loreggia, 2020). In May 2021 WhatsApp blocked at least seventeen Gaza journalists after its automated review associated their group traffic with militant content, erasing whole chat histories in the process (Al Jazeera, 2021). A pastel sketch shared by a teenager to an art‑therapy chat can encounter the same machinery. Compression artefacts shift colour values, a crimson accent is parsed as a missile plume, and the image triggers a “violent content” flag and disappears. The facilitator apologises and asks for a new upload, and the teen’s emotional momentum stalls. Mohydin’s policy paper on Gaza notes that such micro‑interruptions accumulate into a new register of suppression, felt as personal rebuke rather than technical failure (Mohydin, 2024). Facilitators must therefore work on two levels at once: widening the imaginative gap that makes play possible, and mapping the infrastructural mesh that can choke it. The cellars of 1943 offer a resonant pre‑digital prelude to these conditions:In the public shelter, the kids were all huddling together wondering if we had been hit when the earth shook—or else just bored by the long waiting times and wondering how we could change this. A few of us, mainly under the leadership of my brother and myself, explored the fantasy of an underground world as a play space. Regardless of the political alliances of our parents, we started to construct furniture together, painting the walls and carpeting the ugly cellar floor of our private air‑raid shelters. We assisted each other in building toys and selecting puppets or vehicles to go permanently into this underworld. After the first of the three devastating bombardments of our city and neighborhood, we had to spend more time in our “underworld” than above. When the alarm howled, we tried to arrange it so that we reached a shelter where we could all play out our stories. We had long‑running stories with puppet protagonists, featuring ourselves in well‑defined roles. (2011, pp. 53-54)Yet despite such frictions, participants still report what Knill once called an expanding “range of play.” A well‑documented example comes from Ovalau Island, Fiji. In April 2005 elders, fisherfolk and Suva‑based university students spent nine days building a 1:10, 000 participatory three‑dimensional model of the entire island (Rupeni et al., 2005). Using coloured pins and wooden dowels, elders traced ancestral footpaths and near‑shore fishing grounds that spring tides now cut off twice each month. When one cardboard reef layer warped and lifted, children burst into laughter and immediately dubbed the buckle “the breathing reef,” a name that stuck throughout the workshop. That playful moment helped younger map‑makers talk about land loss without shutting down emotionally. The finished relief was later carried to the Lomaiviti Provincial Council, where community delegates used it to argue that any future relocation plan must include space for a new mangrove and food‑garden nursery as well as for houses, a recommendation that appears verbatim in the island’s Resource Management and Action Plan (Rambaldi et al., 2006, pp. 30–32). In other words, the choreography of the mapping session inverted the usual hierarchy. Provincial planners ended up following the community’s colour‑coded contours instead of treating the model as a decorative prop. Critics often wonder whether community‑based art merely acts as palliative care for structural violence. Does it lull participants into accepting the unlivable, or divert insurgent energy toward outputs that please funders with tidy metrics? The question is not idle, especially where grant cycles arrive laden with compliance clauses and monitoring spreadsheets. Yet Palestinian artists have repeatedly folded that very skepticism back into the work itself, turning donor bureaucracy into dramaturgical material rather than leaving it as an unspoken frame.Consider the House of  Yasmine, first staged in 2012 inside Jenin’s Freedom Theatre. The play opens as a mock television talk‑show in which the host, a human‑rights worker named Yasmine, invites the audience to comment on foreign aid and the Palestinian Authority’s statehood bid. As the plot spirals, Yasmine is struck by a sniper and well‑meaning friends scramble to draft funding proposals for “green medicine” while she bleeds beside them. Each proposal is stripped of political language, each must be countersigned with a pledge that no funds will reach so‑called terrorists. The absurdity compounds until viewers can see the aid pipeline itself as a character more powerful than any actor on stage. During post‑show discussions spectators in Jenin openly critiqued their own NGOs’ reliance on foreign money, insisting that the performance made visible a cycle in which recovery is delayed so that professional saviours can stay employed (Gyeney, 2012).Nearly a decade later the same dramaturgical critique moved from stage to street. In late 2019 a bloc of Palestinian organisations issued the Against Terrorism and Against Conditional Funding statement, launching what soon became the National Campaign to Reject Conditional Funding (BADIL, 2019). By July 2020 the campaign counted roughly 230 signatory NGOs and was the subject of substantial local press coverage, with spokespeople arguing that the European Union’s new anti‑terror clause criminalised everyday political life and forced civil society to police its own members (Alsaafin, 2020). Activists circulated graphics that reproduced the contested contract language on recycled aid banners and overlaid it with medical icons labelled “Development”, a visual reminder that aid can keep patients alive without letting them recover (Campaign Q & A, 2020). The pressure worked at least in part. EU representatives entered follow‑up consultations on the clause’s wording in the second half of 2020, confirming that aesthetic intervention can nudge policy when the debate refuses to stay indoors (Alsaafin, 2020).Later work at the Freedom Theatre has pushed the funding question into the rehearsal room itself. Writing in The Stage, director Zoe Lafferty describes 2021 studio sessions in which acting students arrived with real rejection letters from foreign donors, read the bureaucratic prose aloud as if it were lyric text, then translated its phrasing into physical improvisations. Some letters collapsed into abrupt silence, others exploded into dance phrases that mimicked stamping, signing or shredding. Lafferty stresses that the exercise did not remove the funding bind but instead it equipped emerging artists with a concrete way to name the power relations they must negotiate before any show can open (Lafferty, 2021).Far from anaesthetising rebellion, these practices externalise the donor apparatus so that young performers can walk around it, cut it down to scale, or, on nights when the satire lands, laugh it off the stage entirely. In that laughter the critical charge survives, sharper than the paperwork it refuses to obey. This vignette shows infrastructural doubleness; bureaucratic language bent into stage satire that circulates on and off paper.Knill once wrote that the completion of a communal artwork may “elicits an Aha” (Knill, 2015, p. 87); today the exclamation often sounds ironic. Participants, fluent in meme logic, sometimes sabotage neat finales on purpose, preferring a ragged edge over tidy catharsis. One need only watch the closing session of the Courage in Congo mural program, held in April 2016 outside Goma’s CAMME youth centre. According to the project’s final evaluation, the unveiling ceremony was scripted to end with dignitaries posing beside a freshly varnished wall. Instead, several adolescent painters began thumping empty water jugs to test the echo under the zinc roof. The beat spread to waiting relatives who added bottle‑cap shakers, and within minutes the planned speeches dissolved into a call‑and‑response chant that drowned the microphone. Evaluators abandoned the formal debrief and suggested that the impromptu percussive loop achieved the project’s psychosocial goal more vividly than any survey item could measure (Colors of Connection, 2016, pp. 28-29).A comparable tilt toward productive discord emerged at the 2024 Goma Dance Festival, held outdoors on June 15. Associated Press images show performers sliding barefoot across the open stage, splashing through thin sheets of rain‑water that had gathered between lighting runs. Rather than stop, they folded the puddles into the score, clapping sharp back‑beats off the surface while two spectators upended plastic wash‑basins to deepen the percussion. Festival director Florent Muganza told reporters that the improvised “water riff” conveyed more about the chaos of coltan extraction than any choreographed freeze ever could (Sawasawa  &  Pronczuk,  2024). When the piece ended there was no tidy curtain call; the audience drifted away humming the pulse that the dancers had coaxed from the downpour, leaving only a chain of blurred photo frames where protest, weather and play briefly coincided. The puddle riff widens durational poetics by folding rainfall into the score’s living meter.In moments such as these the artwork’s harvest is not the polished freeze but the aleatory surprises that widens the range of play, inviting everyone present, facilitators, funders, toddlers, clouds, to improvise the ending together.Knill closes the circle, showing how a wartime underworld finally surfaced into daylight: Interestingly enough, the mothers did not interfere: they seemed to be relieved that the kids were taken care of, while they had to cope with gardening and civil service, maintaining the infrastructure of the city without husbands, who by that time they all were in the army. By 1944 our “Magic Underworld” was so fascinating that we spent more time playing together there than outside; most of our toys, pastels and papers joined us there. The kids of the two sides never enacted the political rift, even though we knew about the fate of the Reich and awaited the GIs with eagerness. Our great personal experience was our play in the magic underworld, and our sadness when it was over. My brother and I ended up having a good friendship with the German kids, and we went on using the password we invented to begin the play for many years more. (2011, p. 54)The harvesting phase, Knill’s term for structured reflection, now frequently passes through encrypted chat rooms where anonymity cloaks risk. Conversation may be punctuated by blurred selfies or ironic GIFs, a participant will declare, “I felt like the drone camera,” and the group deciphers whether that metaphor refers to surveillance or to transcendent overview or both. What was once a face‑to‑face naming of sensory impressions has become multi‑modal polyphony. The facilitator, aware that biometric identifiers could be extracted from video, may instruct everyone to switch off cameras and translate movement memory into rustling paper or mouth‑click rhythms. Decentering thus stretches not only across imaginative domains but also across layers of digital self‑presentation.Knill’s cellar followed a linear wartime rhythm. Sirens, shelter, rumour, liberation. Twenty‑first‑century crises loop instead. In March 2022, the cooks who had once fronted #CookForSyria reopened their Instagram playbook as #CookForUkraine. By October, the project had enlisted 292 restaurants and raised about £1.8 million for UNICEF and allied relief agencies, showing that a recipe perfected for one catastrophe can be reheated for the next (Cumming 2017; Hercules & Timoshkina 2022). A similar echo was audible in Berlin, where Burcak Sevilgen and Faina Karlitski turned an empty coworking suite into two makeshift classrooms for forty newly arrived Ukrainian children. Within two weeks they had secured rent‑free rooms from the search‑engine cooperative Ecosia, sponsorship from the youth charity Arche and a flow of small private donations that covered teachers’ stipends (Associated Press 2022). Mbembe notes that contemporary war is “no longer waged between the armies of two sovereign states” but by armed factions whose violence settles into everyday civilian space where conflict becomes a durational condition rather than an event (Mbembe 2019, p. 35). Under such atmospheric siege, community art must beat like a metronome, repetitive, adaptive, and able to metabolise shock through low‑threshold gestures that do not promise closure yet keep agency alive.Sea‑level rise grinds at Tuvalu’s atolls centimetre by centimetre, and policy has begun to move only slightly faster. Canberra and Funafuti signed the Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty on November 9, 2023, and the agreement entered into force on August 28, 2024 (Australian  Department  of  Foreign  Affairs and  Trade 2024). The treaty created the Falepili Mobility Pathway, a ballot that will grant up to 280 permanent‑resident visas each year to Tuvaluans who choose migration as a form of climate adaptation. When registrations opened on June 16, 2025, 3,125 people, almost one third of the nation’s 10,643 citizens, entered the ballot during its first week (Agence  France‑Presse 2025).Artists and archivists responded with durational tactics rather than single‑night galas. One thread reaches back to Water is Rising, a fourteen‑city tour that carried dancers and musicians from Tuvalu, Kiribati and Tokelau across the United States in 2011. The performers beat biscuit‑tin drums and chanted for renewable energy, insisting that a footwork pattern repeated night after night could speak statistics in a register auditors might finally feel (Ayers 2011; Smithsonian  Ocean  Portal 2011). Another thread unfurled at COP 26 when Foreign Minister Simon Kofe recorded a speech while standing knee‑deep in Funafuti Lagoon. The video went viral, previewing Tuvalu’s plan to build a full digital twin of the nation, complete with scanned topography, family photo albums and hymn recordings stored on cloud servers in Singapore (Guardian  Staff  and  Agencies 2021; Green 2022). Officials describe the twin as “a safety deposit box for sovereignty,” an archive that will outlast the palm‑roots if the tide keeps climbing.Side by side, the Falepili visa ballot and Tuvalu’s digital‑twin project expose culture as more than decoration. They show it is circuitry that must stay live when people scatter. Tuvalu’s government says the online archive is being built for island schools and for households abroad, so that hymns, lagoon sound‑scapes and language lessons can be streamed wherever the diaspora meets for evening talanoa (Chandran & Zami  2024). ABC reporters following Tuvalu migrants in western Sydney note that “retaining cultural practices” is already a top priority for families preparing to relocate under the scheme (Veldkamp  2024). A phone speaker carrying Funafuti surf across a suburban lawn may seem humble, yet in a crisis measured in millimetres such sensory loops can metabolise exile into continuity. Pedagogy adapts in parallel. Facilitators meeting a traumatised group begin not with objectives but by pacing the room’s tempo. They consult the barometric forecast, knowing that a sudden pressure drop can sharpen neuropathic pain in amputee dancers (Terajima et al.  2025), and they time the first vocal warm‑up between local siren tests to avoid reflex dread. Later, feedback turns anatomical: “I heard your second breath catch when the paper tore; what sensation ran down your Achilles tendon?” Precision invites reflection without pathologising or abstracting the moment.Refugee‑led arts programmes are sustained not just by imagination but by the quiet logistics of electricity. In Jordan’s Zaʿatari camp, traders have run thin cables off the overhead grid into makeshift charging kiosks. For as little as five Syrian pounds a handset is left to drink a night’s worth of current, a micro‑economy that keeps music workshops and video diaries alive even when family shelters stay dark (Pizzi 2013). In the Calais “Jungle” of  2016, Good  Chance Theatre stationed bicycles fitted with dynamo generators beside its geodesic dome so residents and volunteers could pedal phones and amplifiers back to life before the evening show, turning the clatter of gears into a pre‑performance ritual (Haydon 2016). At Budapest’s Keleti Station during the 2015 exodus, Greenpeace Hungary erected a canvas tent whose chief attractions were power strips and free Wi‑Fi. Syrian traveller Rabee Mohammed told a Time reporter that, if forced to choose, he would “choose charging my phone” over food because only a powered handset could reassure his mother that he was still moving west (Witty 2015). Across these sites, solidarity often begins with voltage. A cable passed, a pedal turned, a battery shared, each gesture enabling the next beat, lyric or video call to reach the air. At dawn on day one, pupils glued recycled cardboard contours into a rising relief while elders pinned stories to its damp surface, forming the tactile archive already detailed above that later guided the Lomaiviti Council’s Resource   Management Plan (Rambaldi  et   al.,   2006,  pp. 30–32). This is distributed rehearsal because the model lets villagers rehearse planning authority before it is granted.Knill likened musical accompaniment to a fellow dancer who neither leads nor obeys. The metaphor holds, but the technological substrate now exerts a heavier hand. In a Gaza displacement camp, a musician named Samir wire‑strapped five broken radio speakers into a rough pentagon, hoping to generate surround sound from a cracked Nokia loaded with oud samples. The pentagon worked until a power surge fried three speakers. Samir then placed the remaining two at opposite corners and encouraged participants to fill the silent vertices with body percussion. Children discovered that if they stamped in puddles their splashes rounded the missing frequencies: women layered ululations on top; a Canadian field‑worker live‑tweeted the jam, accidentally feeding a short clip into Western media cycles as evidence of indomitable spirit. Samir cringed at the paternalism yet recognised that coverage protected his workshop from military raid, as the world was watching. Music thus wielded geopolitical leverage by hybridising analogue scrap with digital broadcast.Silence in Ukraine is rarely neutral.When a missile strike trips the grid, the hush can feel like a second weapon. At a December 2022 concert in Cherkasy the power failed mid‑set, plunging singer Artem Pivovarov and three thousand listeners into darkness. Instead of evacuating, the crowd flicked on phone torches and joined Pivovarov in an unaccompanied refrain of “Dumi,” the Taras Shevchenko poem he had set to music. Journalists later described the unplanned a cappella drone as “a blackout turned breathing lesson” that steadied heart rates while sirens wailed outside (Enerio, 2022). Earlier that year, KharkivMusicFest had opened on a subway platform repurposed as a bomb shelter. Violins traced Bach into the tunnel until the audience’s own humming filled the rests between air‑burst concussions, an “oscillation between dread and relief,” as one Washington Post reporter put it (Kornfield  &  Suliman, 2022). In both instances, the absence of electricity did not cancel music, it re‑tuned bodies to the key of survival.Out of the same acoustical void have grown volunteer brigades whose medium is not harmony but hand‑cut polycarbonate. Insulate Ukraine, a collective of Ukrainian and foreign engineers, has installed more than four thousand blast‑resistant plastic windows in front‑line towns where glass supplies vanished months ago. Founder Harry Blakiston Houston calls the work “quiet infrastructure,” because each pane dampens wind roar and artillery echo, giving residents a pocket of stillness in which to think (Voitenko, 2024). In Kherson, emergency crews and neighbours formed ad‑hoc “window teams” that replaced thirty‑three thousand panes in the winter of 2023 alone. Radio Free Europe noted that the crews often worked in near silence, the only sound a utility knife scoring plexiglass while distant shelling rattled doorframes (Kuzakov & Tizard, 2023). Here artistic sensitivity morphs into logistical attunement: a song that survives a blackout teaches rhythm for the hands that later seal a frame, and the hush that once threatened vulnerability becomes the measure against which repaired walls, roofs, and nerves are tested.Earlier expressive‑arts manuals insist that feedback stay descriptive, never interpretive. In practice that rule now travels through translation engines whose logic is anybody’s guess. Jessica Bauman’s nine‑day theatre intensive in Kenya’s Kakuma camp made the problem visible. Her  English explanations arrived in Swahili shrunk from paragraphs to bumper‑sticker slogans, so she abandoned verbal nuance and coached forty Congolese, Somali and South Sudanese actors to sculpt meanings with bodies instead of clauses (Bauman, 2016). When a joke vanished in transit the group simply paused, replayed the gesture in silence, and let laughter surface on its own timetable, proof that mistranslation can open, rather than close, a field of play. The principle survived the final performance. Reviewers noted that spectators “read” the show through movement alone, an outcome Bauman later framed as evidence that descriptive feedback can ride on muscle memory when language fails (Bauman, 2016).Failure, likewise, is no longer a verdict; it is raw pigment. After La   Soufrière blanketed Saint  Vincent in volcanic ash in April  2021, painters Calvert Jones and Cheyenne Slater mixed that powder into acrylic to memorialise the eruption. Their trio of canvases auctioned two months later to fund reef restoration carried visible grit and curators warned that particles might flake, yet bidders embraced the risk, arguing that instability was “part of the testimony” (Harry, 2021; St.  Vincent & the Grenadines Conservation Fund  [SVGCF], 2021). Reviewers called the ash‑speckled surfaces “devastation held in suspension,” and primary‑school classes were invited to touch a small test panel so they could feel the fragility for themselves. What once looked like a materials defect became a pedagogical asset: residue that keeps the catastrophe restless, refusing the fixity donors often demand.Aesthetic responsibility therefore now includes bureaucratic storytelling. Translators must re‑describe emergent art so auditors, who never glimpsed the process, grant it ontological status. A facilitator in Caracas refers to this as “paper choreography”, the careful folding of spreadsheets until they resemble what actually happened, without flattening its contradiction.When Israeli bombing razed the street where filmmaker Ahmad  Hasaballah had hidden his 360‑degree camera, the Phoenix  of  Gaza XR team assumed the project was over; yet in May 2024 neighbours pried the device from the rubble. Lenses cracked but the memory card intact. Co‑creator Naim Aburaddi uploaded the salvaged footage to hard drives in Ramallah and Boston, then stitched it into new virtual‑reality “after” scenes that sit beside the pre‑war marketplace panoramas first captured in 2022. Viewers who tour the exhibition now toggle, headset in hand, between a fig orchard buzzing with bees and the same orchard seared black. The digital overlay survives where the physical grove has vanished, an act Aburaddi calls “saving the memory even when the soil is taken” (Dellis, 2025).Meanwhile, in Khan Younis, displaced art teacher Basel  El  Maqosui runs what he calls Artistic Residence, Not Displacement. Children and mothers gather beside aid tents to draw their shredded streets on whatever scraps appear, a UNRWA notebook page, an empty flour sack, the silver underside of a pain‑killer blister pack. The workshop’s ethos is simple. If bombings erase canvases, the next canvas will be whatever the blast leaves behind. El Maqosui has logged more than one hundred such sessions since October 2023, and his students’ charcoal ruins and bright palm fronds now hang in the Under Fire exhibition in Amman, where curators note that “medicine packaging and tea stains stand in for oil paint” (Abdul, 2025). Digital memory and scavenged material thus answer the same question from opposite sides of the blast line. How do you keep a window open when the wall itself is gone?In that iterative palimpsest one glimpses the core premise of contemporary communal art. Material, digital, and narrative layers co‑evolve, each ready to step in when the other collapses. Decentering, then, is not an escape from reality but a pivot among multiple partly broken realities, each offering a distinct foothold.Words still struggle to keep pace with the practices that sprout wherever conflict, climate stress, and colonial residue overlap, yet three very recent constellations hint at the scale of the bloom.First, a puppet on the move. “Little  Amal,” a 3.5‑metre Syrian‑refugee marionette animated by Handspring Puppet Company, has now walked more than 8,000 kilometres, from to Manchester, then on to Latin‑American and U.S. cities, stopping at each border to trade gestures with local choirs, schoolchildren, and immigration activists. The project’s producers call every layover an “open score”, an invitation for towns to compose their own welcome scene, whether lullaby, lantern procession, or kite release (Lehnen, 2021). Because the puppet’s operators rotate at each venue, technique is continually relearned in public, making the walk itself a lesson in portable pedagogy.Second, coins in a Chicago gallery whisper about debt. At the Chicago Cultural Center, ceramicist kelli rae adams’s Forever in Your Debt fills the Sidney R. Yates Gallery with hundreds of hand‑thrown bowls slowly accumulating visitors’ spare change. Each vessel represents roughly one‑tenth of the average U.S. student‑loan balance. When all bowls brim, the installation will equal the $37,000 borne by a typical borrower (City of Chicago DCASE,  2024). Gallery docents report that South Side high‑school groups now use the piece as a live abacus during workshops on abolition economics. Students tip coins from bowl to bowl, rehearsing how a jubilee might feel in the hand long before legislation arrives.Third, a river delta materialises in virtual headsets. Along Botswana’s Thamalakane River the Nkashi Classic mokoro race has added an “Edu‑Tent” packed with VR gear supplied by the Okavango Eternal conservation partnership. Between heats, teenagers steer digital canoes through a photogrammetric model of the Okavango Basin, then walk those headsets into briefings with visiting corporate sponsors. A pupil can quite literally drop a hippo sound‑scape into a mining‑executive’s board‑slide (Mmegi Staff Writer,  2025). Organisers say the VR detour has already shifted two funders from extractive concessions to riparian‑buffer grants, evidence that immersive play can redraw a finance sheet. Here infrastructural doubleness turns VR headsets into capital brokers, stitching digital wetlands to real budgets.Knill’s caravan of “open scores” has indeed become a flotilla, carried today by puppetry rigging, rolled coins, and 360‑degree wetlands. The grammar remains constant, curiosity disciplined by care, surprise tempered by consent, play bracketed by rigorous return. Water‑is‑Rising tours, visa ballots, puddle percussion, all stretch performance across months or millimetres, refusing tidy finales. Durational poetics metabolises slow violence by looping gestures until audiences feel time dilates. The art is not a respite but an instrument for staying with the trouble, rhythm by rhythm. Hope, in this idiom, is not a mood but a craft. It is sculpted each time participants gather voltage for the communal speaker, each time a salt‑stained tracing paper nudges policy, each time a child lifts charcoal to outline a window onto the air. The cellar, the server farm, the submerged reef all are studios in the planetary school of conflict transformation. So long as bombs fall and tides rise, more lessons will be required. Facilitators will arrive with pockets full of low‑skill, high‑sensitivity tricks and communities will decide which to keep, which to warp, and which to hurl back at the sky in defiance.When the next siren sounds, or the next embankment cracks, a door will open, perhaps drawn in dust, perhaps coded in light, and people will step sideways into a zone where the future can be rehearsed before it manifests. They may not know Knill’s terminology, yet they will know in their bones that the rehearsal matters, because on the rehearsal’s far side something shifts: a ligament unclenches, a bureaucrat blinks differently at a spreadsheet, a stranger leans close enough to feel another’s breath. That shift is the precise measure of art’s communal force. It is small, sometimes microscopic, but carried forward through song, pigment, data packet, and gesture, it can inch a whole culture toward the still‑unwritten script of peace.ConclusionWherever people are pressed against the limits of survival, the rehearsal of alternative orders does not cease; rather it mutates. Knill’s password whispered across rubble has resurfaced as QR codes, pixelations, salted paper scores, and puddle percussion, each device repositioning the body just far enough outside the blast radius of despair that choice can re‑enter the nervous system. What looked at first like children’s diversion has proven to be an epistemology, a way of knowing the world through iterative, low‑skill, high‑sensitivity acts that translate calamity into briefly habitable form. The paper has named this epistemology distributed rehearsal, infrastructural doubleness, and durational poetics. The terms differ, yet each captures a facet of the same quiet insurgency, the claim that creativity is not a luxury postponed until safety returns, but a technique for manufacturing safety in situ.Such a claim carries methodological consequences. If policy analysts, funders, and facilitators continue to measure efficacy solely through metrics of restoration, they will miss the subtler, slower kinetic shifts that this study has foregrounded: a ligament that releases during drone‑singing silence, a civil‑service clause smuggled inside a cantata, or a relocation guideline crystallised out of salt‑stained tracing paper. These shifts are small in amplitude, yet they propagate along social filaments much as sympathetic vibrations travel through a shell wall. Ignore them and one misreads the acoustics of resistance. Future research must therefore refine instruments capable of registering relational voltage, aleatory motifs, and temporal layering, lest the evidence of communal force be flattened into bureaucratic anecdote.In the end, hope appears not as an affective surge but as artisanry, an incremental craft of arranging voltage, pigment, code, and breath so that fragile circuits hold long enough for decision and solidarity to pass through. The cellar, the mangrove, the server farm, and the refugee corridor now stand revealed as contiguous studios in the same planetary school. To walk between them is to accept that no rehearsal is ever final and that every score remains open, every portal provisional. 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September 2024Author biographyRichard is an instructor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where he teaches in the Expressive Arts Therapy Program. His work focuses on the intersection of post-human theory, the arts, and arts-based research, focusing on how these perspectives can enliven creative practices.Shannon is an elementary school instructor in Victoria BC. Her work focuses on posthuman theory, new materialism and arts based research.Keywords: Glitch aesthetics, Posthumanism, Remix culture, Ritornello, Anarchive, Choreographic archives, Digital distortion, Emergent choreography, Archival disruption, Dance historiographyAbstractIn contemporary dance, performances slip away the instant a show ends, with conventional archives missing out on the always-shifting interplay of bodies, setting, and mood. This article puts forth something called “glitching the archive,” a posthuman take that recognizes the generative potential of technological glitches: think warped visuals, scrambled data, and sudden repetition. Those errors reshape how dance is documented, reinvented, and shared.Drawing on glitch aesthetics, remix culture, the Deleuze & Guattari-inspired notion of the ritornello, and anarchival strategies, the argument challenges canonical approaches that treat these records as stable, closed artifacts. Instead, glitch welcomes humans, machines, and software to co-create emergent choreographies by unraveling and recombining bits of archived material. Familiar motifs, or ritornellos, pop up among digital distortions, grounding each round while revealing subtle variations.Meanwhile, the anarchive frames these shifts as open-ended, ongoing processes, resisting the fixed and final nature of traditional documentation. The blend of glitch, remix, and anarchic logic emphasizes the bodily, contingent, and beyond-human dimensions that feed into contemporary dance. We discover that archives aren’t finite containers of memory but lively sites for constant reshaping.Viewed from that angle, every glitch becomes a chance to spark the archive’s untapped possibilities, opening doors to new choreographic directions that disrupt linear dance history and call out conventional notions of ownership and authorship. Maybe the glitch isn’t a mistake but an invitation: a rhythmic stutter that leads us somewhere thrillingly unexpected.PreludeContemporary dance has long been defined by its live, fleeting qualities; what occurs onstage, in a specific space and time, tends to vanish once the performance is over, leaving behind only fragmentary traces in the form of written notes, digital video, or anecdotal memory. Over the centuries, choreographers and dance scholars have grappled with how best to document these time-embedded or durational experiences (Franko, 2005; Lepecki, 2006; Taylor, 2003). Traditional forms of dance notation such as Labanotation (Laban, 1939) or Benesh Notation (Benesh & Benesh, 1956) sought to record bodily positions and transitions on the page, yet these systems failed to capture the expressive intensities and affective intricacies (the shift of weight, the performer’s affective tone, the flux of energy that arises in dialogue with music or environment) that enlivened the actual event. With the rise of photography and then film and video, archiving efforts became increasingly entwined with technologies that promised to store movement for future retrieval (Birringer, 1998, 2002, 2008). Although these audiovisual records expanded our capacity to revisit past works, the oscillatory tension between the live event and its recorded trace has never fully resolved, as many scholars point out that a camera, no matter how high the resolution, cannot replicate the immersive, interrelational dynamic of being there. Digital technology, especially in the form of high-definition streaming, motion-capture data, virtual reality, social media, and emergent digital ecologies, heightens these archiving possibilities even further, yet inevitably reveals the precarity of any claim to a “complete” record. At every turn, the uncontainable essence of movement, a fleeting interplay of corporeal, sonic, and environmental dynamics, exceeds or disrupts the boundaries of the recorded document.In reply to such quandaries, dance scholars have repeatedly stressed that archives must be acknowledged as partial, contested spaces and as selective frameworks that preserve certain aspects of a performance and ignore or erase others (Schneider, 2011). We can see this in the ways past dance has been documented and canonized: certain choreographies, often originating in Western concert dance traditions, achieve a privileged status through repeated restaging or distribution on widely circulating media, whereas others (including folk or community-based dances) remain absent from formal archival systems and thus risk fading from institutional memory (Buckland, 2006). Debates over how to address these imbalances frequently circle back to questions of how one might expand or unsettle the canonical archive, seeking a more inclusive and ever-shifting approach that acknowledges the living, constantly morphing nature of dance. This article takes up that challenge by proposing a provocation referred to as glitching the archive, an approach that calls attention to the generative potential of mistakes, disruptions, and accidents within both the creative process and the historical record. It emerges from a posthuman vantage, echoing the machinic multiplicities that embraces nonhuman actants (including, but not limited to, digital platforms, computer algorithms, and hardware vulnerabilities) as agentic co-creators in choreographic processes rather than passive apparatuses at the disposal of human intention (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 1991).Instead of treating technological malfunctions—corrupted files, broken frames, crashes, or misalignments—as hindrances to dance preservation, a glitch-centered mindset views them as unexpected openings that can expand our conceptions of the archive and of dance itself. This viewpoint draws from ongoing conversations in posthuman theory, glitch aesthetics (Cascone, 2000), remix culture (Lessig, 2008; Navas, 2012), the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of the ritornello (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), and the idea of the anarchive as introduced by scholars such as Manning and Massumi (2014) and Zielinski (2015). Together, these ideas converge on a provocative, nonconformist proposition: dance as an art form might be better served by seeing its documented traces not as conclusive evidence of what once happened but as continually shifting materials that demand continuous reactivation, an approach that disrupts conventional notions of closure, completeness, and finalized authorship. The emphasis here falls on the methodological possibility of deliberately seeking or harnessing glitches and remix strategies within digital archives to generate new choreographic thought and to reshape how dancers, researchers, and audiences access the past.The article’s core argument is that glitching the archive can operate on two levels: first, it reveals hidden infrastructures, biases, and assumptions within archiving systems (technical, institutional, or otherwise) by exposing their vulnerability to error and breakdown; second, it catalyzes a posthuman perspective that understands choreography as an emergent, co-creative endeavor among human bodies, software systems, motion-capture data, and unpredictable digital phenomena. While the concept of glitch has been extensively theorized within electronic music, video art, and network culture, its potential to propel contemporary dance’s inquiries into new transversal zones remains ripe for deeper interrogation, particularly in dialogue with posthuman perspectives that de-center the human choreographer and reimagine creativity as a multi-agent dynamic. Remix culture further enriches this conversation, offering a conceptual structure through which archived fragments can be sampled, looped, layered, and transformed. The interplay of remix and glitch highlights that dance archives need not be stable repositories but might instead be rhizomatic incubators that continually reinvigorate and reconfigure how choreographic knowledge circulates. The ritornello concept, as taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) writings on repetition and difference, serves as a connector: it highlights how cyclical returns or refrains function to anchor an otherwise unpredictable, glitch-ridden environment, providing enough familiarity to let difference flourish. Finally, the notion of the anarchive offers a shifting theoretical scaffolding by refusing linear genealogies and static forms of preservation, positioning the archive as a field of potential transformation rather than a conclusive record of past achievements.The text that follows begins by outlining the key conceptual currents: posthumanism, glitch aesthetics, remix culture, the ritornello, and the anarchive. It then considers the methodological ramifications of adopting glitch-based or remix-oriented strategies to engage with dance documentation, envisioning how these might be put into practice, either hypothetically or in orchestrated research-creation contexts. An extended discussion examines how such strategies could transform teaching, creative processes, and the very conceptual anchor of dance historiography, while also raising critical questions about authorship, ownership, and ethics in a digital environment where “original” sources are perpetually subject to reconfiguration. Throughout, I emphasize how the marriage of glitch aesthetics and an anarchival sensibility reveals dance to be a living, perpetually unsettled form, reminding us that the wildly elusive vibrancy of movement does not disappear when performances end, but rather mutates and evolves within every new instantiation of media and memory.Conceptual CartographiesAlthough the idea of a dance archive might conjure images of pristine recordings preserved in climate-controlled repositories, an understanding of how archives actually function requires a deeper engagement with theorists who question what is included, what is excluded, and under whose authority these decisions are made. Derrida’s (1996) articulation of “archive fever” suggests that archivization carries an inherent drive to secure and police the boundary of what counts as knowledge. In dance, these boundaries often reproduce canonizing or hegemonic impulses favoring particular lineages or geographies. By contrast, scholars such as Diana Taylor (2003) underscore that the repertoire, or embodied transmission of cultural memory can never be fully contained within archival documents; there is always a remainder that resists textual or audiovisual capture. Taylor’s distinction between the archive and the repertoire sets the stage for conceptualizing dance not merely as something that can be pinned down but as an embodied act that lives on through performance, teaching, and often ephemeral forms of communal memory.The shift toward posthumanist or more-than-human theorizing elaborated by theorists such as Rosi Braidotti (2013) and Karen Barad (2007) challenges entrenched human-centered epistemologies by foregrounding how nonhuman forces—ranging from animals to machines to environmental processes—are not mere backdrops but active players in processes of knowledge-making and creativity. In the realm of dance, this perspective disrupts the assumption that choreography proceeds solely from the artistic genius of a singular human subject who directs passive bodies and tools. Instead, it stresses that bodies, technologies, sensors, and software collaborate to shape movements, sometimes in ways unforeseen or even unwelcome from a human standpoint. When placed in dialogue with the concept of the archive, posthumanism reveals that digital storage, camera apparatuses, editing programs, streaming platforms, and the entire technological substrate shape what is captured, how it is indexed, and how future viewers might retrieve and interpret it. Glitches within this substrate become signs of the system’s immanent agency, perhaps arising from code-based anomalies, hardware deterioration, or unforeseen network conditions. A posthuman vantage thus inspires dance scholars to ask which actants are at play in shaping how choreography is documented and disseminated, with the recognition that nonhuman elements hold as much sway in the end result as the dancers or archivists themselves.Glitch aesthetics first rose to prominence within electronic music. Cascone (2000) famously wrote about the aesthetics of failure in a post-digital context, describing how skipping CDs, software crashes, and digital hiss became integral to the compositional logic of certain experimental musicians. Where conventional engineering might treat these errors as noise to be minimized, glitch artists foreground them as material that unsettles the listener’s expectations, pointing toward the hidden infrastructures of the medium. Menkman’s (2011) in-depth exploration of glitch theory extends this principle to visual culture, contending that glitch discloses the encoded, algorithmic operations of digital media that typically remain invisible. In a dance context, a glitch aesthetic can manifest when a video file stutters or breaks into pixel blocks, when audio randomly repeats or cuts out, or when motion-capture data contorts into impossible shapes because frames are missing or corrupted. Rather than discarding such distortions, choreographers who embrace glitch treat them as catalysts for new movement ideas, for instance, by trying to replicate the stutter in bodily form or by aligning the dance with the disjointed rhythms of a corrupted audio file. Glitch thereby becomes an entry point for seeing how machine or system failures reveal undisclosed possibilities for bodily expression and interpretive layering.Where glitch highlights the accidental, remix emphasizes deliberate processes of sampling and recombination. Remix culture, though it first gained widespread recognition in DJ and hip-hop circles, has expanded to encompass a vast range of creative fields, from literature to video art to academic writing itself. Eduardo Navas (2012) views remix as both an aesthetic and an epistemic-compositional maneuver, in that sampling and recontextualizing fragments from pre-existing works serve not only as compositional strategies but also as ways of thinking—systems of knowledge production that revolve around repetition, difference, and citation. In dance, remix might manifest as the appropriation of steps from iconic choreographies (such as the splicing of Martha Graham’s angular gestures with voguing or popping) or the layering of multiple performance timelines into a single video collage. Remix becomes particularly germane to archiving, since an archive can be seen as an assemblage of fragments awaiting reactivation in new contexts. While standard archival practice strives to maintain a coherent record of a piece as it was performed in a given moment, remix culture undermines the notion of a stable original by openly reordering and morphing those records, acknowledging that authorship is shared across genealogies of borrowing. This sensibility dovetails with posthuman thinking to the extent that it acknowledges how creativity is never purely ex nihilo, but instead arises from intertextual or intermedial convergences among bodies, images, and data streams.The ritornello motif, Deleuze & Guattari (1987), mediates between reiterative patterns and transformation. Deleuze (1994), in Difference and Repetition, notably explores how repetition never reproduces the same event, since the context in which something reappears has changed, making-certain that every reiteration generates difference. Applied to dance, a ritornello might be a recurring phrase or motif that anchors a piece by providing a familiar signpost. Even if the chain of steps remains outwardly the same, micro-variations accumulate, whether due to modifications in the dancer’s energy or shifts in the environment. In an archival and historical context, a ritornello can take shape when choreographic fragments reemerge or  surface across different epochs or in multiple stages of glitchy transformations. The repeated motif or gesture becomes recognizable enough to signal continuity while simultaneously marking the subtle changes that accumulate over time. By weaving glitch aesthetics and remix culture into dance documentation, choreographers and scholars illuminate how the ritornello can function as a unifying common thread that holds together an otherwise unwieldy tangle of corrupted data, spliced imagery, or algorithmically remapped motions. This approach resonates and aligns with the posthuman idea that all forms of repetition (and, by extension, memory or recorded trace) are entangled and  interconnected with the processes of becoming that shape them.The anarchive, introduced in part through the writings of Manning and Massumi (2014) and further elaborated by Zielinski (2015), diverges from conventional widely-accepted archival logic by resisting or rejecting  the idea of a terminal and all-encompassing record. Instead of positioning the archive as the endpoint of a historical or documentary process, the anarchive foregrounds or highlights  how archived materials remain in persistent flux, always subject to future reworking and reconfiguring. This inherently resonates and  aligns with dance’s emphasis on live enactment, yet it challenges the standard notion that records ought to lock down and secure the memory of what was. An anarchival perspective openly declares that any trace—a piece of video, a photograph, a motion-capture sequence—gains meaning only when re-embodied in subsequent performances or interpretive acts. Rather than sealing the past, the anarchive fosters what some theorists call feed-forward, Manning and Massumi (2014), a generative impetus that calls archived content into renewed presence. Glitching and remixing become anarchival strategies insofar as they deliberately break the illusion of archival finality, acknowledging that stored material might be corrupted, distorted, reassembled or taken out of context at any moment, with each intervention sparking new choreographic and interpretive possibilities.Unfolding Methodological PathwaysAlthough this text does not describe a specific, completed workshop, it can be instructive to conceive of how a hypothetical practice-as-research / research-creation experiment setting might activate these concepts and theories in practical, hands-on and experimental ways. One might begin with a selection of archival dance footage gathered from different times and styles—perhaps older black-and-white footage of modern dance pioneers, more recent high-definition recordings of contemporary works, motion-capture files extracted from rehearsal processes, and a range of associated textual materials such as choreographers’ notes, lighting plots, or stage diagrams. In a conventional archiving process, this material would be meticulously  cataloged and preserved, making certain that future researchers could access a near-pristine record of each performance as it originally occurred. However, a glitching methodology would encourage participants to manipulate, tamper with or ‘misuse’ these data sets, subjecting them to code corruption, random reformatting, or forced collisions across platforms that do not normally communicate (such as opening a .mov video file in a raw text editor and then saving the scrambled output). The newly glitched files might refuse to open in typical playback software, or else might generate striking distortions and jarring anomalies when they do.Some participants could then try to decode these corrupted and glitch-laden files with creative media tools, retrieving and extracting partial fragments of frames, discovering and noticing pixel smears or odd looping clips.  Projected onto walls in a studio environment, these glitch-ridden images could function as catalysts for improvisation and real-time exploration, encouraging dancers to mimic, respond to, or otherwise enter into dialogue and engage with the shattered visuals. Alternatively, audio files that have suffered partial data loss or corruption might generate spontaneous loops or abrupt silences that guide the dancers’ timing in directions no one could have foreseen. Because glitch art honors the revelation of the medium’s underlying and foundational structure, such a practice would amplify participants' awareness that the technologies purportedly capturing dance’s reality are themselves actively shaping that reality.In tandem with glitch experiments, remix strategies could be undertaken to reorder choreographic fragments. One might isolate three-second loops from each of several archival videos, layering them in nonlinear fashion so that a leap from a 2005 site-specific performance collides with a suspended gesture from a 1980 ballet excerpt, followed by a snippet of a 2019 improvisation captured in motion-capture format. The resulting collage destabilizes the usual chronological narrative of dance history, creating what might appear as anachronistic mash-ups that provoke new ways of seeing continuity and difference across time. Remix culture’s emphasis on sampling not only calls attention to the genealogical interconnections among choreographic vocabularies but also pushes artists to treat the archived material not as a relic but as unfixed matter for creative re-enactments.Posthuman Inflections in Choreographic AuthorityWhile the approach described might at first appear antithetical to institutional, historically entrenched notions of choreographic authorship—since it redistributes control and invites technological errors to direct creative decisions—it resonates with the arguments that posthuman scholars have made regarding the dissolution of the lone genius myth. Braidotti (2013) insists that a posthuman ethic requires us to acknowledge that humans are not at the center of the world, nor are they the sole source of agency. Karen Barad (2007), with her theory of agential realism, similarly argues that events emerge through entangled interactions among human and nonhuman forces. In dance, this line of thought is advanced by scholars and practitioners who highlight how the moving body is never a closed system. Instead, it is shaped by everything from stage architecture to wearable sensors to the gravitational pull that undergirds each step. Bringing glitch to the foreground makes this interplay more visible by intensifying the unpredictable contributions that digital systems make—sometimes in direct opposition to the choreographer’s initial plans.In practical and hands-on terms, certain creative communities might resist relinquishing creative power to “random errors,” insisting that a professional choreographer’s vision should reign supreme. Others would see the integration of glitch as a forward-thinking approach, consistent with a longstanding avant-garde tradition that welcomes chance procedures (recalling the experiments of Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who employed the I Ching to introduce unpredictability) Copeland, R. (2004). Indeed, glitch can be viewed as a new iteration of chance operations that pivot away from a purely anthropocentric impetus. Dance artists wishing to explore the posthuman frontiers of their discipline can derive inspiration from glitch-based logic, which suggests that software crashes, data corruption, and the partial erasure of imagery can become generative constraints rather than obstacles to be remedied.Glitch as Critical-Aesthetic Forensics in the ArchiveBeyond fostering new compositions, glitching can operate as an investigative and exploratory catalyst for understanding dance archives in ways that a purely restorative, reparative or preservationist logic may overlook. When a digital video degrades—perhaps because of the gradual obsolescence of its codec or the physical deterioration of a storage medium—archivists typically strive to rescue the original as faithfully as possible, thereby enabling viewers to experience the footage with minimal distortion. However, by intentionally allowing or exacerbating such degradation, one observes the foundational layers that shape how the dance was encoded and digitized. Pixel blocks, color banding, audio dropouts, or timecode disjunctions become evidence of the archive’s material conditions, exposing the illusions of continuity that standard playback fosters. One might discern from these breakdowns the hidden structures of compression algorithms or the fragility of certain digital storage formats. Rather than dismissing these revelations as undesirable and problematic, one might treat them as interpretive clues that speak to the social and technological environment of the period in which the archive was maintained.For example, a glitch that repeatedly stalls an image of a dancer mid-leap could draw attention to the precarious nature of physically virtuosic movement; suddenly the ephemeral or transient flight is pinned to a digital freeze-frame that flickers in and out of existence. This ironically reaffirms the tension between dance’s impermanent and transient presence and the archival desire to halt its disappearance. Although not every glitch will yield deep insight, the general point remains that an archive in systemic error mode can prompt reflection on how tenuous the process of documentation really is. It also invites parallels to those intangible elements that defy capture—like the kinesthetic and movement-based empathy an audience feels or the intangible relationality among performers. Indeed, letting an archive glitch is one way to highlight that no single medium, no matter how high-fidelity and accurate, can claim to represent dance fully. Instead, we see dancing bodies as co-constituted by overlapping systems (biological, cultural, digital, ecological), and every glitch is a sign of this ongoing negotiation and dynamic interplay.Remix Culture, Gesture Genealogies, and the Undoing of Originality Remix culture, often lauded for its radical subversion toward originality, dovetails neatly with the longstanding lineage of choreographic analysis that acknowledges how movement vocabularies circulate and evolve across eras and contexts. Even canonical ballets or modern dance works are historically layered: the steps one sees in a current restaging of a classic piece may differ dramatically from how they were performed decades earlier, owing to changes in technique, dancer anatomy, or aesthetic norms. Remix culture offers conceptual vantage through which these transformations can become overtly foregrounded. Instead of concealing the fact that choreographers borrow, transform, or reconstruct older movements, a remix-oriented methodology celebrates the rearrangement of segments or gestures as a legitimate creative act, breaking from conventional authorial claims from the limitations imposed by ‘original’ ideals.When integrated with glitch practices, remix can call attention to the interplay of deliberate citation and accidental distortion. Imagine extracting the iconic “contraction” from a Martha Graham solo, then layering it with glitchy footage from a contemporary breakdance performance, followed by an abrupt interpolation of a site-specific improvisation done by dancers in an urban environment echoing the posthuman entanglements of bodies and cityscapes. The digital platform stitches these fragments together, but the code occasionally drops frames, causing sudden textual leaps that jar the viewer. The result is a kaleidoscopic assemblage that does not pretend to unify these elements seamlessly; rather, it foregrounds the colliding forces and new syncretisms among styles, historical moments, and technological aesthetics. One might see a direct line of inspiration from early modern dance to contemporary urban forms, or one might focus on the new hybrid creation that emerges in the glitch-ridden errorscape of machinic disruptions. In either case, the “original” texts dissolve into a swarm of iterative citations, resisting claims of any notion of untainted authenticity that often accompany archival footage. The effect can be unsettling, jarring or revelatory, and often it is all at once.Ritornello as Rhythmic Refrain for Perpetual BecomingIn the midst of an environment saturated with glitching and remixing, a performance or documentation strategy may risk appearing purely chaotic to audiences or researchers unless there is some device for providing a sense of recognizable anchor. The ritornello, as Deleuze and Guattari elaborate in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), offers precisely that anchor: a repeated refrain that, each time it resurfaces, reorients participants in the flow of events. In dance, a ritornello might appear as a short choreographic phrase that recurs throughout the piece, each time slightly altered by context. Such repetition differs from a mechanical duplication; Deleuze (1994) underscores that all repetitions produce difference. When frames are glitched or data sets are remixed, the repeated phrase becomes a marker of both identity and variation. A diagonal run might remain a diagonal run, but the lighting might flicker differently, the music might skip or invert, or the dancer might incorporate newly gleaned movement features from a corrupted motion-capture skeleton.The ritornello thus structures the viewer’s experience, creating a cyclical pattern that draws attention to how each new manifestation differs from the previous one. An audience might learn to recognize this recurring motif as a kind of “home base,” but they also might be attuned to how it warps in response to the digital distortions inserted at that particular moment. For choreographers, the ritornello can serve as a compositional device to unify a piece that otherwise embraces accident and disruption. For archivists, it can serve as an index of how the archival record evolves over time. If one collects multiple video recordings of the same piece across different seasons or tours, the repeated phrase might be the easiest segment to compare in order to detect performance variations. In glitching the archive, the ritornello might be deliberately singled out for repeated corruption, ensuring that each instance of the refrain is visually or sonically degraded in a new way, thus making difference newly visible each time. This interplay of recurrence and mutation resonates deeply with a posthuman view of dance as an ongoing negotiation among human bodies, data streams, and the infrastructures that transmit and transform them.The Anarchive as Open-Ended Creative ProvocationThe anarchive, as conceived by Manning, Massumi, and others, pushes us to see archival matter-flows less as terminal points in a historical progression and more as unrealized intensities for future emergent re-compositions. This feed-forward logic counters the traditional impetus to fix, conclude and freeze the past. If we incorporate a glitch-inspired aesthetic and a remix sensibility into an anarchival praxis, we recognize that we are not merely saving documents for posterity, we are actively changing them to open new possibilities, thereby acknowledging that every retrieval of the past is also a creation of the present. This perspective subverts the assumption that the best way to honor a dance legacy is by preserving it in unaltered form. Instead, it suggests that emergent authenticity resides in the capacity of dance to mutate and generate fresh interpretations, fully acknowledging that the fleeting event-horizon of performance can never be replicated in identical terms.That said, a friction arises inevitably between an anarchival ethic and the role of many institutional archives that are mandated to protect and maintain historical artifacts. Dance companies, universities, museums, and libraries often strive for transparency and fixity in their collections, aiming to facilitate accurate reconstruction or scholarly research. In such contexts, actively glitching or corrupting the archive might appear antithetical to preservation mandates or might violate standard archival orthodoxy. One possible path of reconciliation is to maintain two bifurcated archival channels: an official, stabilized version that meets the standards of conventional preservation, and a second, openly glitchable continuum open to glitch-based manipulation and remix. This dual approach satisfies the desire for documentary rigor while allowing a coexisting practice of creative activation. Alternatively, an institution might adopt an anarchival stance in some curated contexts (temporary exhibitions, interactive digital interfaces, or research-creation laboratories) without discarding its commitment to preserving canonical forms elsewhere. The friction between archival fixity and creative corruption or glitching need not be absolute but can be ongoingly navigated as part of a larger institution-wide discourse on the evolving nature of dance documentation.Pedagogical Inroads and Performance Research ExtensionsIf we expand these inquiries into pedagogical contexts, we uncover fertile ground for rethinking how dance history or technique might be taught. Rather than presenting archival footages and materials as wholly factual documents, educators could invite students to deliberately corrupt, scramble or remix the videos, extracting idiosyncratic movements or micro-gestures that resonate with them. By literally deconstructing historical footage, learners might gain a somatic comprehension of how choreographic vocabularies overlap or diverge across periods, how specific cultural contexts shape movement choices, and how machinic or computational technology can unravel or restitch choreographic lineages. This approach encourages participatory, practice-based engagement with the archive, transforming it from a static repository into a vivified playground for exploration. Students could also experiment with motion-capture data sets from canonical works, intentionally scrambling, reformatting or re-engineering them to generate new solos or group compositions that bear traces of the original while also highlighting machinic input or glitch impetus. Such methodologies might be integrated into courses on dance composition, media aesthetics, or performance history, broadening students’ skill sets to include both a critical awareness of digital infrastructures and a willingness to collaborate with their accidental malfunctions.A glitch-remix praxis also enriches the wider field of performance scholarship extending beyond dance into theatrical or transdisciplinary art forms that rely on documentation. The field of performance studies, influenced by scholars like Schechner, Phelan, and Auslander, has long attended to the tension between embodied immediacy and mediated spectacle. Introducing glitch into that discourse illuminates how machinic or computational ecologies are never passive and can spontaneously insert aleatory disruptions that shape performance outcomes. A show reliant on real-time video projections might glitch mid-event, rendering the performer’s silhouette unrecognizable. Instead of swiftly fixing the feed, an approach informed by the glitch ethos might incorporate the error into the performance’s narrative or scenic design, letting the system’s breakdown become an improvisational catalyst. Such maneuvers fold seamlessly into the posthuman orientation since they acknowledge that the performance is not purely the result of anthropocentric design but an co-emergent phenomenon that arises through complex human–nonhuman entanglements.Complexities of License, Attribution, and Cultural RespectGlitching the archive and engaging in remix practices inescapably sparks questions about intellectual or cultural ownership and the ethics of sampling and appropriation. In the contemporary dance world, choreographers often negotiate licensing agreements when restaging their works or using excerpts(segments, portions, selections). Remixed material that splices multiple choreographies might upend and unsettle these norms, particularly if the manipulations and reworkings render the sources partially unrecognizable or transform them beyond recognizable inheritance. If the archive belongs to an institution or an artist’s estate, there may be restrictions on how the audiovisual materials or associated data can be disseminated or manipulated. Posthuman perspectives and glitch aesthetics might implicitly push back against such closed and exclusionary proprietary systems, suggesting that the lines between original and emergent derivation are always porous, and that collaborative creativity is stifled or suppressed by excessive or overly-strict gatekeeping. However, respecting the artistic labor, cultural engagement and cultural embeddedness of artists remains paramount, especially if a remix approach inadvertently appropriates culturally specific material without proper acknowledgment. Balancing these dimensions requires sustained ethical discourse, and, ideally, dialogue between archivists, choreographers, institutions, and the communities that hold cultural or historical stakes in the documented works.Such negotiations can be conceptualized through the lens of radical citation, a term sometimes invoked to describe a transparent, hyper-explicit referencing of influences that also invites further transformations. Radical citation admits that all creative acts draw genealogically from earlier influences, while simultaneously encouraging a non-proprietary or commons-based stance  that fosters ongoing reinterpretation. Glitching, in this sense, becomes a form of radical citation turned inside out since it lays bare and reshapes the very media in which choreography has been archived. One might credit both the original choreographer and the “glitch event” that triggered an unexpected choreographic rupture, acknowledging the layered co-presence  of historical lineage and posthuman accident. By doing so, dance scholars and practitioners can forge new standards of credit and communal recognition processes that reflect the interwoven and hybrid conditions of the digital age.Speculative Horizons in Glitching the ArchiveAt a wider cultural scale, this shift correlates with the broader cultural moment in which digital technologies pervade every aspect of life, and the illusions of a perfectly stable, recoverable record are fading as formats change, servers fail, and digital decay accumulates. Glitch offers a way to aestheticize and strategically mobilize for generative ends  that inevitability, turning what might be dismissed as digital entropy or malfunction into a site of creative renewal. For dance, which has historically been a time-based, often precariously documented form, the transient nature  of dance, long lamented as a barrier to study and preservation, becomes a transformative advantage when reinterpreted through glitch and remix, because the fragmented or corrupted record  is no longer a failure but a catalyst for creative evolution that drives the art form forward into previously uncharted choreographic landscapes.CodaThe perspective offered here contends that radically reimagining and transforming dance archives—in light of posthumanism, glitch aesthetics, remix culture, the ritornello principle, and an ethos of anarchival fluidity—can reshape our fundamental assumptions about documentation, authorship, pedagogy, and the lifespan of choreographies over time. When archives are “glitched”, we see that the technologies meant to preserve dance are themselves precarious and prone to alteration, thereby challenging the assumption of an immaculately unaltered or fixed, conclusive record of movement. When these glitches are consciously embraced and adopted as creative openings rather than mere technical failures to be fixed, they reveal how nonhuman processes co-generate and  collectively shape choreographic material, entangling digital platforms and scaffolds with bodily expression in ways that neither purely human intention nor purely technological determinism can fully control. Remix culture amplifies these radical and disruptive possibilities by demonstrating that archived fragments are not static vestiges but can be sampled, overlaid, and reinvented to yield new movement vocabularies, and new multisensory and multi-modal aesthetic experiences. The ritornello provides a recursive framework within these open-ended processes, guiding viewers and participants back to a recognizable refrain that nonetheless shifts and morphs each time it recurs, thus weaving continuity and difference into a dynamic, evolving interplay. Finally, the anarchive gives conceptual support to the notion that dance documentation is most alive and generative and creative when it is understood as a living set of potentials, always at risk of glitching again, always open to return, reinsertion or re-embodiment in new contexts and to new interpretations that might arise from accidents, improvisations, or expansions beyond the human choreographer’s design.This perspective does not eliminate the very real challenges of preserving dance history and respecting genealogical choreographic lineages nor does it mandate that all archivists surrender their goal of accurately documenting performances for future study. Instead, it invites dance makers, scholars, and students to confront the constraints and partialities of every archival gesture and to explore how embracing those glitches and gaps can become a pathway for renewed creative life. The fleeting ontologies of dance has often been a cause for anxiety within the field, driving archivists to refine their methods for capturing as much detail as possible. Yet glitching the archive underscores that the impermanent essence of dance is exactly what fuels its ongoing reinvention. The recorded traces are not static memorials; they are generative kernels that can sprout new performances each time they are glitched, remixed, or otherwise engaged. Through a posthuman lens, the archive itself becomes a plane of composition for collaborations between bodies and bits, humans and hardware, structured repetition and aleatory breakdowns. If indeed the future of dance relies on accepting the interplay between live corporeal presence and digital mediation, then glitch, remix, ritornello, and an anarchiclogic of archiving offer critical pathways for shaping that future. The vibrant collision of choreographer, dancer, glitch, and remix, all swirling within the open field of an anarchive, stresses the fact that dance remains ever in motion but mutates and proliferates, defying the limits of static re-presentation. It is precisely in this interstitial, perpetually transforming space that the vitality of dance can be found.A. References Used in the TextBarad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press.Benesh, J., & Benesh, R. (1956). An introduction to Benesh dance notation. Adam & Charles Black.Birringer, J. (1998). Media and performance: Along the border. Johns Hopkins University Press.Birringer, J. (2002). 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(1958). A textbook of Kinetography Laban (Labanotation) (Vol. 1). MacDonald & Evans.Louppe, L. (2010). Poetics of contemporary dance (B. Cooper, Trans.). Dance Books. (Original work published 1997)Martin, R. (1998). Critical moves: Dance studies in theory and politics. Duke University Press.Preston-Dunlop, V. (1998). Looking at dances: A choreological perspective on choreography. Verve Publishing.

Scripting AISlide 1: IntroductionScript: Before I introduce myself.This session will explore the integration of ethical and aesthetic considerations in the use of Artificial Intelligence in education. We will highlight key concepts such as ”Caught in the Act” (caught in the arts), ”Thought in the Act” (sensory-based thinking), and ”Taught in the Act” to examine the dynamic interplay between creativity, technology, and academic integrity.Drawing on principles from Expressive Arts Therapy, I will argue for an ethico-aesthetic approach that fosters deeper engagement, inclusivity, and responsible innovation. The presentation will address practical implications, ethical challenges, and opportunities for AI integration in education and therapy.The session will consist of approximately 30 minutes of lecture, followed by a 30-minute Q&A segment. For further details, including the full script, please visit exa2024.com, which also features interactive bots and experimental tools. We will conclude with a discussion of case studies, reflections, and key takeaways.Slide 2: About Me

Richard Wainwright, PhD European Graduate SchoolShannon Stevens, PhD Independent ScholarOctober 8, 2024 AbstractThis paper explores the intricate nature of learning engagements through the concept of experimental recombinatoriality (Wainwright & Stevens, 2016). As ontological shifts de-centre the human subject, we draw on DeleuzoGuattarian philosophy to challenge conventional modes of thought and the clichés associated with art. Within Arts-Based Research (ABR), our intellectual pursuits align with the notion of machinic-arts as described by jagodzinski and Wallin (2013), focusing on contemporary art’s potential to create singularities instead of static representations.Termed Machinic Arts-Based Research (MABR), this framework integrates machinic impulses with arts-based research, and operates within open systems to generate forms of thought that are novel. By rejecting traditional methodologies and welcoming the provocations arising from the inquiry process, MABR seeks to foster innovative, posthuman modes of inquiry that transcend disciplinary boundaries and foreground the interdependencies of human and nonhuman entities.

Tatjana Jansen, PhD Vancouver Art Therapy Institute tatjanaejansen@gmail.comRichard Wainwright, PhD European Graduate School richard.wainwright@egs.edu AbstractAligning with Harney and Moten’s (2013) concept of the  Undercommons , this article challenges conventional psychological practice frameworks that have, arguably, marginalized arts-based healing practices, sometimes reducing them to mere tools for analysis rather than full recognition of their capacities. Such reductionist approaches have constrained the arts’ potential to contribute more holistically and transformatively to therapeutic practices. We therefore argue that these historical models often overlook the interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman entities as well as the embodied nature of identity and subjectivity, which are central themes to both the arts and therapeutic practices.Harney and Moten’s Undercommons envisions a space of subversion and resistance, where traditional knowledge and marginalized practices are nurtured, at a length from the institutional gaze that seems to co-opt them. Drawing on Harney and Moten’s work, along with a revisiting of phenomenology through the lens of posthumanism and new materialism and other interdisciplinary perspectives, this paper argues for a radical reorientation in the Expressive Arts. We propose working in the Undercommons, a space that is continuously in motion, engages the ‘wild beyond’ of established norms and pushes for a more expansive and interconnected artistic practice.Keywords: Expressive arts therapy, posthumanism, new materialism, creativity, therapeutic practiceIn Motion: A Constant State of ArrivalIn “Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy, ” Stephen K. Levine (2005) articulates what is a significant shift from the reductionism of the arts to existing psychological frameworks and a call for us to value the arts for “their own intrinsic capacities… [and] not merely as adjuncts to psychological or social functions. This perspective honors the arts for their unique ability to transform, to create new possibilities, and to engage the imagination in ways that purely psychological approaches cannot” (p. 9).For many of us working in the field of creative arts therapies11Creative arts therapy is an umbrella term for the various arts-based therapies (i.e., art therapy, dance therapy, music therapy, play therapy and expressive arts therapy). Expressive arts therapy is an intermodal approach that engages visual arts, movement (dance), sound (music), poetry and narrative., this has profound resonance; the arts are our way of knowing, of sense-making, and as a field, psychology has tended to create the feeling that the arts are marginalized, flattened, and compartmentalized. While the field of expressive arts therapy (EXA) certainly does not reject psychological frameworks, some run counter to the ethos of the field—frameworks that march on without us (Mandlis, 2009) and that, more often than not, are fracture points in the regimes of truth and practices (Foucault, 1995). As Ellen Levine (2003) suggests, ”[a]s artists and therapists, our ethos is to stay in the imaginal and effective realm and to maximize expression coming from these realms” (p. 181), particularly through the lens of phenomenology.And it is in the ethos of expressive arts therapy that we view the arts as being in constant states of arrival, always in motion, never quite fully settling into conventional academic and therapeutic frameworks. Instead, they are always in a state of becoming—full of imaginative possibilities, refusing the diagnostic impulse and preconceived ideas of the present ’therapeutic’ moment. Here, we call for shifts in how we value the arts, not as static or secondary, but as ever-evolving and resisting reductionism. Our work is in motion and in a constant state of arrival, where new subjectivities can be performed across and between encounters. It is radical, transformative, and risky; like research that happens in an unsafe neighborhood, “to enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 26).Breaking the Frame: Dismantle, and DisruptWhat exactly are we dismantling and attempting to disrupt? There are Western philosophical movements that have informed the work of expressive arts theorists, the most significant being phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s (1945, 1968) work is relevant here in giving an account of human embodiment, what the living body senses, and the arts themselves appearing as formed expressions and actively shaped. “Here the subject stands as the reflecting, imagining, shaping and speaking member of a world of coherence and rupture, alternately making sense and no sense of [their] life; the human field of the poietic, erotic tension of value and sense making” (Jacoby 2017, p. 86). The materiality of the arts, the process, and art-making as poiesis is central to expressive arts theory, the “thingly act or object” (Knill, 2003, p. 85) that we make sense of through its becoming, along with the co-mingling of people, materials, artwork and environment.From Structuralism’s introspective analysis of consciousness to Behaviourism’s focus on observable behaviour, these frameworks among others flatten the complexity of our individual and collective experiences. As Harney and Moten suggest (2013), these frameworks function in a narrow spectrum, neglecting the ‘wild-beyond’ where the arts thrive, continuously pushing the limits of conventional thought. EXA, it seems, ought to embrace broader philosophical perspectives, including, we argue, posthumanism22Posthumanism challenges the anthropocentric focus of traditional humanism by decentering the human subject and exploring more-than-human relationships and ontologies., new materialism33New materialism emphasizes the dynamic agentiality of matter and interconnectedness between human and non-human entities. and some of the other emerging philosophical approaches to research methodology. The radical rethinking of established norms aligns with the need to, in the current times of radical ecological and technological change, begin working with agentiality of all matter and the interconnectedness of human and non-human entities. If we envision EXA as having rejected the reductionist trends of the past, we now consider the need to yet again be more spacious in the theoretical curiosities we entertain.This spatiality requires both place and condition, which Harney and Moten describe as the Undercommons . It exists just beneath or below the formal structures and institutions of society, including the university, the state, and other forms of governance. “The Undercommons is a place where those who would have been described as displaced persons, or marginalized persons, or unfree persons, who resist being hailed by those names, gather to study, to plan, to refuse, and to resist” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 28). There is a potentiality within these often temporary, shared spaces of incompletion and collectivity. In academic settings, these can be usurped spaces to create, study, and care for each other outside the dominant institutions.The Movement of Things: Agency, Materiality, and the ArtsWhile earlier we mentioned the importance of being in motion, we consider that as the nature of all earthly matter—a motion that relates to other things, central to Harney and Moten’s overall work on social relations and fugitive practice—a world of continuous transformation and potential. Here, we title the section The Movement of Things to distinguish motion from movement, with movement implying intentionality, which is a politicized activity.Haraway’s (2016) concept of sympoiesis , defined as ‘making with,’ is central to understanding how movement functions, with a focus on collective agentiality, materiality, and the arts. Unlike autopoiesis, which focuses on closed systems, sympoiesis examines the collective and interconnected nature of all living and non-living things. In EXA, this translates into acknowledging the collaborative relationships between the human therapist, client, and non-human entities such as materials, artwork, and even the environment, where agentiality is distributed across all participants in a state of continual co-creation. Haraway (2016) explains,  “Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It means ’making-with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. […] Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it” (p. 58).Extending this posthumanist framework, Rosi Braidotti’s (2019) philosophy of becoming helps us further move beyond the anthropocentric view of the human subject. While she doesn’t use the termsympoiesis , she does emphasize the relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity. Braidotti explains that posthumanism is grounded in the “relational capacity” of entities to affect and be affected rather than in a centralized individual human subject. For Braidotti, subjects are always in flux, embedded, and interrelated with their environment, emphasizing the importance of non-human agents in identity formation—concepts that resonate with Haraway. Building on the posthumanism of Haraway and Braidotti, where they highlight the relational nature of subjectivity and the entanglement between human and non-human entities, we can further explore how these ideas resonate with earlier phenomenological perspectives. Merleau-Ponty, whose work on the body as a site of perception, informs us about how subjectivity is formed not only through individual consciousness but also through embodied relational experiences.For Merleau-Ponty, human subjectivity is connected to the experience we have of our own bodies—situated body-subjects, thick subjects that are meaningfully individual—and the unity of bodily existence. For the purposes of the therapeutic encounter, this might involve exploring how some of our stories or histories get sedimented in us and what the relationship is between our bodies and the body of the world, “a thing among things” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 137). Continuing, he explains:The body interposed is not itself a thing… but a sensible for itself… a set of colors and surfaces inhabited by a touch, a vision… caught up in the tissue of the things, it draws it entirely to itself, incorporates it, and, with the same movement, communicates to the things… that identity without superposition, that difference without contradiction, that divergence between the within and the without. (p. 135)Merleau-Ponty’s insights into the body’s role in perception and subjectivity can assist us in further exploring how poststructuralism extends this decentering of the subject. While Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the body’s embeddedness in the world, post-structuralism destabilizes the very notion of a unified subject. Thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze challenge the stability of meaning, seeing it as constructed through language, power, and discourse.Post-structuralism’s decentering of the human subject, its recognition of meaning’s instability, and considerations of power and discourse have opened up the helping therapies to new possibilities based on feminist, Indigenous, and many collaborative and dialogical practices. Here and elsewhere, we join scholars of posthumanism and new materialism who are forging change-oriented theories for addressing the challenges of our times. No longer is the individual subject the sole focus of our work.These shifts, in turn, have influenced psychology and are woven through EXA theory. The authors inquire what EXA would look like along posthumanist and new materialist lines—a mutual constitution of entangled human and ”more-than-human” (Abram, 1996) agents ”intra-acting” (Barad, as cited in Kleinmann, 2012) with one another, where subjectivity and identity are no longer primarily encircled by human concerns or centered on human identities. While some have pulled at threads and worked along the edges of these theoretical lines in EXA, what of a more articulated, active movement toward an assemblage of multiplicities—a theoretical and practice-based composition or cartography—that amplifies the already-begun deterritorialization of ”traditional structures of therapeutic practice” (Whitaker, 2008, p. 16) within an EXA frame? To further expand on these ideas, posthumanism and new materialism provide critical frameworks for understanding the mutual constitution of human and non-human agentiality.Theoretical Saunterings: Reading, Writing, DeparturesMoten and Harney (2013) may very well have considered saunterings in the same way that Benjamin considered his Arcades Project (1999) or Deligny his Wandering Lines (2015), as movements and motions that capture both the spontaneity of creative activity and the disciplined action of the activist. Sauntering through theory—reading, writing, and taking departures—rejects the linear and goal-oriented approaches typically demanded by academia and psychology. As Haraway (2016) suggests:It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what description describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. (p. 12)Our own arts-based inquiry, or sense-making, occurs in part through experimentation, play, and the struggle of revealing, concealing, (re)visiting, and (re)learning—by aesthetically responding to and inhabiting different theoretical worlds and realms of experience. What is the relevance of play, creativity, and the transitional space for expressive arts therapy theorists? Ellen Levine (2003) writes:Because play and creativity are interconnected, [Winnicott] locates the origins of creativity in physical experience that is played out initially in the earliest relationship of life… If the environment can “hold” this primary creativity, then the child’s capacity for creative expression in the world will have been established… for Winnicott, creativity is not a defense against anxiety but the very expression of existence itself. To be alive is to be creative. (p. 65)The Wild Beyond: Creativity, Play, and SpaceFor those of us working daily in EXA, Winnicott provides the conceptual foundation for understanding play, extending to the wild-beyond that begins with the parent (traditionally the mother). Winnicott describes a space between the mother (or primary caregiver) and baby; it is a holding space that allows for unintegration and formlessness, a catching (and holding) for when we fall. “Relaxation for an infant means not feeling a need to integrate, the mother’s ego-supportive function being taken for granted” (Winnicott, 1971a, p. 48).Care in this context is contingent on a number of issues. The unintegrative state, as described by Winnicott, can be made problematic by external factors such as racism, poverty, and the violence of war, along with specific familial issues that—sometimes idiosyncratic, may also be intensified by factors exogenous to the efforts of the primary caregiver. In turn, these issues interfere with care and the growing child’s ability to suspend their emerging identity “in creative play, in the exploration of potential… [and this] potential space involves a different being in a different world” (Game & Metcalfe, 2008, p. 18).Harney and Moten draw an important parallel, one that insists that there is a general state of tension—a collection of stimuli—creating this dynamic. As Moten (2018) articulates, “What this knowledge of freedom requires is an improvisation through the sensible and the intelligible, a working through the idiomatic differences between the modes of analysis which would valorize either over the other” (p. 93). This understanding of freedom through improvisation aligns with Winnicott’s concept of creative play, which allows for a kind of unintegration without falling into chaos, a state of suspension that nurtures potential rather than collapse.While they never specifically address Winnicott, Harney and Moten describe parallel states where, perhaps, unintegration could refer to more flexible, dynamic conditions in which elements remain connected, yet not integrated. This is important in understanding both Winnicott’s play spaces as well as the Undercommons. It is a state where potential and possibility are preserved, held by a caregiving environment rather than by whatever sense of identity that may exist. Holding space is held space, again bringing together the concepts from both Winnicott and Harney and Moten.The unintegration that happens in play has something of the wild and even dangerous, nomadically challenging fixed boundaries and territories; disintegration, on the other hand, can be frightening, relentlessly chaotic, and involves an accompanying sense of loss of control (Winnicott, 1971b), as we strain to peer through the darkness, no familiar landmarks in sight. In A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride (2014) has written a fictional account of disintegration, a trauma monologue of broken words and phrases that trace a number of traumatic events, including the blind force of a recurring cancer — it spreads, the cancer itself akin to perverse and treacherous roots that eventually kill the narrator’s brother (and along with it, the narrator’s sense of self, the echoes of which cannot be found anywhere amongst the pages of the self that was). It is a slow vanishing, an erosion of memory and deletion of presence in the face of a terrible absence:But I dream. Roots come growing. Slowly and tangle in. And roots come more. And fat and thick. And roots come fast. Roots fast in. Roots seek us. Catch us. Roots that want our head. Our eyes. We move about. The trees will have us… Hurt me. Until I am outside pain…You finish that breath. Song breath… Stop the. What’s that? My heart. Comes broken now. Broken off in me… My name is. My name for me. My I… My name is gone. (pp. 203-228)In the context of the Undercommons, Harney and Moten make clear the purpose of this dynamic relationship between form and transformation, from integration to unintegration, and their description of wild places not only of political and organizational rebellion, but also as spaces that necessitate the arts.The call is always a call to dis-order and this disorder or wildness shows up in many places: in jazz, in improvisation, in noise. The disordered sounds that we refer to as cacophony will always be cast as ’extra-musical,’ as Moten puts it, precisely because we hear something in them that reminds us that our desire for harmony is arbitrary and in another world, harmony would sound incomprehensible” (Halberstam, 2013, p. 8)Following Halberstam, we in EXA, speak of expanding the range of play with our clients, as it is in play that they/we can bring something new into the world; our subjectivities are suspended in creative play. I am no-body, I am every-body, I am not-I, I am a thing among ”a Parliament of Things” (Latour), an ”actant,” to borrow the terminology of Michel Serres (1982), with my own agency, putting in motion another’s action—decentred in EXA terms, in this nonlinear time-out-of-time. It is as if my ”I” were temporarily hovering elsewhere, the dissolving self perhaps a necessary condition to access creativity.Paolo Knill (2011), one of the key theorists of intermodal expressive arts therapy, narrates his own experience as a child growing up in Switzerland during World War II and the “Magic Underworld” — this worlding a result of the constant threat of the Nazis and their onslaught from above that necessitated retreat into air raid shelters below, these shelters becoming a space where the children could vagrantly follow their creative impulses and imagined responses to “play out” their stories. What is also significant here is the fact that the children (between the ages of 7 and 13) were from families “under the Swastika” as well as families (Swiss nationals) who were part of the guerrilla underground (another kind of underworld), actively resisting the Nazis:We had long-running stories…featuring ourselves in well-defined roles… By 1944 our “Magic Underworld” was so fascinating that we spent more time playing together there than outside; most of our toys, pastels and papers joined us there. The kids of the two sides never enacted the political rift, even though we knew about the fate of the Reich and awaited the GIs with eagerness. Our great personal experience was our play in the magic underworld, and our sadness when it was over. My brother and I ended up having a good friendship with the German kids, and we went on using the password we invented to begin the play44 Social psychologists such as John Haidt (2024) have researched the importance of play, with play even being described as the opposite of depression and trauma. Through play, children gain a variety of skills, including dealing with conflict, managing independence, and coping with stronger emotions such as anxiety and fear in low-stakes situations. Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp (2018) stated that trauma impacts emotional play circuitry. This circuitry is first engaged with our caregivers, and a lack of engagement with them and others can cause emotional shutdown combined with an inability to express emotions to others. Stephen Porges (2011), psychologist and neuroscientist, developed polyvagal theory, positing that the ventral vagal system helps us to feel safe and connected. When activated, it is said to stimulate physical and psychological responses, and when we play with others, we feel an accompanying sense of safety and bonding. Play may indeed, in extreme situations, prevent the freeze, a manifestation of the trauma response(s)—that hibernal state of being in the world or what Maurice Blanchot (1995) described as a falling out of being, “already fallen outside of memory” (p. 28). for many years more. (pp. 53-54)This passage in relation to the expressive arts therapies is impactful in multiple ways, capturing the relevance of play to conjure the worlds below out of the fragments of war with all of its uncertainties, and insulating the children from the ongoing trauma and destruction occurring in the world above. The Magic Underworld of Knill’s description is an art-full play space that deranges the traditional map’s surface and the ordinary thresholds of perception, moving between margins and across multiple sites. The so-called objects of play are animated and re-animated by the children, as all is vibrant matter, differences significantly minimized, a shared and elevated materiality between subjects and objects, in which “all bodies are kin” (Bennett, 2010, p. 13). The shape of the world is magically altered in play, potentialities blooming forth, rituals trembling — the implications for this in the therapeutic context are broad, our understandings of self and other(s) enlivened in a full-bodied knowing.Collapsible SpacesIllicit capacities across numerous terrains, the play space can be a collapsible space of fugitivity—hidden, a rupture, one ”that ends with love, exchange, fellowship. It ends as it begins, in motion, in between various modes of being and belonging” (Halberstam, 2013, p. 5). This is the fugitive path of the Undercommons, Harney and Moten’s term (2013) for what lies beneath and beyond various institutions of control—ungovernable, the spaces in between spaces that those with marginalized, outsider status (i.e., Black, queer, colonized, disenfranchised) inhabit and come together. Communities are always involved in the Undercommons, and in their displacement and entanglements, produce knowledge, all of which is productive and creative; ”[t]he Undercommons is an attachment, a sharedness, a diffunity, a partedness” (Harney & Moten, 2021, p. 123). In EXA, community arts (Knill, 2011) is a crucial component of the work we do:The term “community art” is a strange construct, considering that art cannot be thought of without communities. The word, coined by therapists and educators connected to the arts and creativity, stresses the “community” setting as something special and different from the usual one with individuals and groups. (p. 55)For Harney and Moten (2021), the university as an institution—“[i]f we mentioned the university at all it was because it was the factory we were working in when we made our analysis” (p. 123)—is fundamentally flawed in its current role of upholding a society that serves the ends of capitalist/State machine, and where the dispossessed are in the hold. What is meant by the hold? The hold of their formulations is the hold of a ship to transport the enslaved—the ship is the common, with the Undercommons being what emerges “from the enclosure of the common, within and against enclosure” (p. 110). Thus, the Undercommons itself is a fugitive practice, a place of paradoxical holding and being held:Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted,where the revolution is still black, still strong. (p. 26)How are the Undercommons, creative and improvisational in nature—serving as resistance against various systems and moving in fugitive ways underneath the activities of state and capital—relevant to the creative arts therapies?Much like Knill’s Magic Underworld, the Undercommons is a potential space — a world within a world, and we play in this world that is neither inner or outer, following Winnicott’s (1971a) notions of psychotherapy as two people playing together. In community arts, this goes beyond the idea of two or more (humans), to include “other-than-human” (Fredriksen & Haukeland, 2023, p. 10)—the voice of matter and materials themselves, those we co-craft with and enliven—a refusal of subject/object dualisms, a relational poiesis and a folding together of entangled subjects, space, and time. By enlivening, this is not to suggest that things do not have their own animacy or that materials are dead before we work with them. Indigenous scholar Kim Tallbear (2015), citizen of Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate, discusses the materiality of pipestone, red stone that is used to make ceremonial pipes. In 1937, the Pipestone National Monument was created by white settlers, who “saw the place where the red stone lies as an artifact of a waning culture and time” (p. 233):But like producing indigenous biological samples that come to stand for living peoples, making monuments and doing science risk deanimating the red stone… From a Dakota standpoint, the pipestone narrative is one of renewed peoplehood. A flood story tells of the death of a people and the pooling of their blood at this site, thus resulting in the stone’s red color and its description as sacred. The stone is sometimes spoken of as a relative… without it, prayers would be grounded, human social relations impaired, and everyday lives of quarriers and carvers depleted of the meaning they derive from working with stone… In addition, for many indigenous peoples, their nonhuman others may not be understood in even critical Western frameworks as living. “Objects” and “forces” such as stones, thunder, or stars are known within our ontologies to be sentient and knowing persons (this is where new materialisms intersects with animal studies). (pp. 233-234)German-Norwegian artist Martin Kuhn uses a rock called larvikite for his sculptures; he describes how he walks by the rocks and has multiple conversations with them. Recognizing himself as a geological force within the landscape, he listens to what the rocks have to say. However, this becomes more complicated when no such crafting-with larvikite occurs, and Kuhn is “troubled that he sometimes [is] paid to turn a blind eye to the rock and to ignore its voice” (Fredriksen & Kuhn, 2023, p. 116). This is a working against the material’s agentiality and lacks the formality of ritual if the larvikite has not asked to be transformed for something that was “already…inside its rock body” (p. 114)Towards an Ethic of Care: Relationality and Implications for TherapyAn ethic of care across species, human and nonhuman materialities moves us out of the hubris of human exceptionalism, calling attention to what might be deemed worth-less ; to care for who and what has been diminished and rendered invisible or valued only when oriented to “the politics and economy of extraction” (Simpson, 2021, p. 11). In an online interview, Moten, The Undercommons and 21st Century Resistance [Video], Fred Moten states that care is the key, introducing curacy as a form of care; he differentiates this from the curator, who is in control of what is exhibited and shown, what has relevance according to their judgment. The curate is a historical and lowly figure in the church who “engages in day-to-day pastoral care of a parish” (Moten, 2023, 15:00). He suggests that such forms of care have always existed but how “… to advance those forms of care within the new structures that we are constrained to live within…the surest and most reliable forms of self defense [being that]… the practices that we seek to defend we can only defend by engaging… in them.”And what of the imaginal realm as the ethos of EXA? The most authoritative theory taught in psychology programs is Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT) with its truth claims of political neutrality, quantitative good science, and the measures and baselines of existence—in mental health and within agency settings, expressive arts therapy, play therapy, art therapy, etc., are often considered adjunct therapies but not necessarily seen as legitimate fields in their own right, and certainly not good enough for the heavy lifting of real, serious psychotherapy. The ethos of CBT is literal reality and the literal realm: “[o]ne helps the patient modify behaviour in the real world by actually experiencing new behaviour patterns and observing their effect on others’ behaviour” (Levine, 2003, p. 181). The common therapeutic tableau carries a “we will fix/help you” message from therapist to client, where clients are guided through working with their problems and issues by the therapist, many asserting their expertise in a myriad of techniques (the dominant technique for funding being CBT). This obfuscates the reality that interactions are never neutral, and that we cannot step into objectivity, knowing things from a distance, simply by proclaiming it so. Objectivity and subjectivity, object and subject, are entangled in all of what we are a part of. It seems rather disingenuous to speak of neutrality in the field of humanities, psychology as a science, or elsewhere in academia, particularly in light of the most recent predatory exploits and war on Gaza (against a background of the decades-long subjugation of Palestinians), where universities in the United States acquiesce to billionaire funders flagrantly demonstrating the power they wield; university and regulatory or governance bodies have sanctioned, legitimated or at times situated themselves within the frame of settler colonial violence. They have, in short, succumbed to “the wit of the colonial official” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 52), with nation states serving as artifacts of racist displacement, anti-Semitism, Xenophobia, etc. And in the field of psychology, what economic and institutional forces are at work that have reinforced the DSM’s understanding of “psychopathology” and that aligns with the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries? As it relates to CBT, its medicalization, and the neo-liberal mental health economy, “it is the only psychological therapy that receives high levels of both public funding and private funding from pharmaceutical companies… [In this context, it seems relevant and fair to inquire]… whose interests are being served by the ongoing ’success’ of this research?” (Rowland, 2024, p. 9).In EXA, there is a vagabondage at play , as we vandalize aspects of the narratives of psychology that suit us, reading promiscuously across disciplines, metaphoric networks through which we construct concepts. Emerging through the gaps, ourselves “unhoused” (Scanlon & Adlam, 2022), we find unseen accomplices in the house of (un)belonging:By ‘unhoused’ then we mean to denote individual and group experiences of having been displaced, in ways that are profoundly unsettling, from membership of communities large and small with which one either identifies or finds oneself problematically identified by others. (pp. 5-6)We are extending Scanlon and Adam’s metaphor regarding unhoused minds and bodies to an unhoused, dis-membered body of practice, hovering in the doorway of institutional psychotherapy as it becomes more and more regulated across provinces in Canada. These are the systems that dictate, policing with burgeoning policies of what counts as knowledge and legitimate practice. How do we navigate these systems and oppressive environments while holding an ethical frame in EXA predicated on entanglements, with core practices that return us to community and play? This fugitivity is not isolated to the creative arts therapies, as therapists who are not solely of the CBT persuasion—seeing it as another modality among modalities—turn to their clients for how they make sense of the world, rather than a top-down approach dictated through various public funders, mental health and insurance providers. We know that people are more than their cognitions, passive objects of consumption waiting to be fixed or fixed back into resilient workers, military personnel, students, etc. If we are not mentally well and happy, then we are mentally ill and disordered, with social and structural factors bracketed. And for those who want to turn psychology into a science, we find ourselves aligned more with Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway in their contentions that science is political and that scientists construct facts, or with Karen Barad (2007) in what she describes as “agential realism”:Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don’t obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. (p. 185)As to other psychotherapy practices, the authors note the relevance of postmodern therapy discourse in exploring hierarchy, power, and knowledge as a between-persons phenomenon, and the category of therapist as an institutionalized position that can operate as a productive force of power. This is not to say that therapists and clients are passive bodies, as both may be able to refuse and resist the prescriptions of power and knowledge; however, Marxist-feminists such as Sara Ahmed (2010) suggest that oppressed people are often blamed for the oppression they face, antidepressants and therapy notwithstanding. At the very least, they should display a happy diversity for others, even with “histories that may linger as mood” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 20). Such is the psychological impact and the nature of these “minor feelings when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized identity, thereby creating a static of dissonance” (Hong, 2020, p. 36). The kids are not alright, with Marxist philosopher Franco (Bifo) Berardi (2008) noting that depression is most likely a bi-product of the helplessness that so many young people feel in a world where they are disempowered at every turn, with “the global crisis that is darkening the historical horizons of our time. We are not dealing in a linguistic trick; we are not dealing only with metaphor, but with the interweaving and interacting of psychic flows and economic processes” (p. 1).The locution of psychotherapy and frameworks that seek to manualize and standardize interventions55From Latin intervenire ”to come between, intervene; interrupt; stand in the way, oppose, hinder,” from inter ”between”… Sense of ”come between, fall or happen between” (of events) is from c. 1600; that of ”interfere, interpose oneself between, act mediatorially” is from 1640s. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/intervention). do not flow easily through our fingertips when we bring in the arts. Consider these interventions (or interferences) in terms of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) refers to as symbolic violence, a form of misrecognition where those from the dominant group “let the system they dominate take its own course in order to exercise their domination” (p. 190). What might the limited training within graduate programs for therapists-in-training to be self-reflexive and self-reflective combined with various regulatory regimes vying for power and control mean in terms of obscuring alternative narratives within the context of psychotherapy and other mental health fields? What are the regimes patrolling the borders of the dominant social, political and economic order? And how do we “intervene” in a way that attends to the inequalities and structural barriers that clients may face, where the assessment and interventions do not conceal a host of power-related therapeutic phenomena? Combined with this, how could the arts be misrecognized/abused when therapists lack aesthetic attentiveness and responsibility outside of and within the frame of the imaginal realm—for example, following their own agenda or the mandate of agencies in which they practice?The posthumanist and new materialist non-hierarchical, pluralistic and inclusive ontologies evade some of these interfering tensions. The arts, the artworks, and the materials have their own agency; playing in EXA terms is a valid form of knowing, doing, and becoming. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2022) in Rehearsals for Living write of a larger connection where ”[w]e are remaking the whole world - at once in our most intimate and local places, and through our matrix of relationality with all living things and anticolonial movements on the planet. A never-ending project, a practice, a way of living” (p. 186). EXA as a practice benefits from this political, decolonizing shift, and to focus on the vitality of matter and the “thing-side of affect” (Bennett, 2010) has implications for how, who, and what we listen to, and our sense of care towards things, living and non-living. The things in EXA may be transitory and ephemeral in nature. Sometimes “the phenomenon of creativity” (Knill, Barba, & Fuchs, 1995, p. 27) shows up as an expressive response, gesture, movement, dance, spoken word, a song that is materialized through embodied transmission. Perhaps a movement becomes repetitive—a choreography, a musical score to be returned to —or there is a no-thingness , as the poem always fades from our grasp, “a turning of breath [Atemwende] that is barely perceptible” (Derrida on Paul Celan’s The Meridian , 2005, p. 109).This is process and becoming, a fugitive momentum with EXA practice involving the “diffracting”66See Barad (2007) on diffractive methodology, the diffraction referring to the subjective position of the researcher - it serves as an acknowledgment of the structure of the research assemblage and the entangled relationships between research and researcher. Ethics is predicated on this entanglement./subversive/fugitive therapist. Their work is to upend the more harmful presuppositions of psychology, “mark[ing] the dissonance of any attempt to harmonize them” (Moten, 2017, p. 75), particularly in relation to the arts. As Harney and Moten (2013) inquire,Can this being together in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? ( p. 96)In this assemblage of relationships, the ethos of the work in EXA is deepened when we add non-human agentiality to the imaginal realm, and play space. Consider, for example, the traditional dyad of therapist and client; in an EXA session, we add a third, the artworks/workings-of-art(s). The third is part of an ensemble of heterogeneous elements in the room, where the relationship(s) are non-hierarchical and rotational; each part represents different ontological entities that are known or experienced through a multi-sensory approach. According to Tronto (2013), a researcher who studies models and ethic of care, it is relationality that will transform the world. There are revolutionary issues that care raises, when care is “viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’… That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Tronto & Fisher, 1990, p. 40). In more recent iterations of Tronto’s care ethics discourse (Tronto, 2024, 35:30), this involves consideration of care in the Anthropocene as well as an aesthetic of care (for example, that care itself can be beautiful rather than a mundane task, and that we approach care as artists might in relation to their works); Amin (2012) is a social theorist and geographer who suggests that we need to move from carelessness to attentiveness in terms of how we perform and embody care, “such that empathy—for objects, projects, nature, the commons—can spread as a public sentiment that also serves to regulate feelings among strangers” (p. 12). Attentiveness to the needs of care is something that Tronto (Parra Jounou & Tronto, 2024) also highlights in her work, suggesting that care itself is a practice; we only get better if we practice care, even in the so-called caring professions.What might such a practice look like? Certainly, the idea of an ethical practice as it relates to images (and their agency, a de-centring of subjects to include ‘objects’) is not new to the field of art therapy or EXA. Shaun McNiff (1991) coined the phrase, “dialoguing with the image,” the image itself having autonomy, agency, and rights, alive with its own suchness; Bruce Moon (2020) in discussing ethics in relation to images stated that, “[i]magicide is the intentional killing of the image through labelling it as one thing, and thus restricting it” (p. 60). The dangers of not meeting images with a degree of reverence, care77And if self-care is part of this conversation, it is the self-care of community activism and those who use care to sustain themselves, as they fight for care and equality for what/who has been othered, de-valued. (https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2021/05/10499036/reclaiming-self-care-audre-lorde-black-women-community-care), and a philosophy of not-knowing (Anderson & Goolishian, 1992) moves us to scripted interactions, repressed senses, marginalized elements, with meanings predetermined and matched to image: the ingredients for such a structured recipe might include a box of crayons (less clean-up), with a therapist offering “art therapy” by employing a directive to the client that the therapist has pulled off the internet.For Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012), the world is inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, with the intersection of our experiences involving “a sort of gearing into each other” (p. 85); we gear into the arts, phenomenologically speaking. Through a posthumanist lens, however, agency—or Latour’s distributed agency (2004)—extends to countless objects, themselves actors, an assemblage of activated relations, always in the process of becoming (Deleuze & Guattari,1987). It is about shared practice versus individual roles (Harney & Moten, 2013), and in the expressive arts therapy encounter, it is an “ ‘otherness’ that enters into us and makes us other” (Steiner, 1989, p. 188).The arts have their own dynamic life, “seek[ing] interaction and dialogue with other things” (Pallasmaa, 2011, p. 88), and in EXA, we are co-inhabitants, units of matter and experience in a landscape of activity, “a phenomenology of intra-play” (Richards & Haukeland, 2020). The term intra-play references Karen Barad’s intra-action, and how we become together - the client, the EXA therapist, the artworks(s) are involved in a dance of human/nonhuman agency, where instruments and apparatuses generate sound, image, and dynamic reconfigurings. Objects have their own specificity or properties, and are entangled with other things. Entwinings and reconfigurings also include the digital world, generating even more matrices of intra-action with other networks or rhizomes; agency is enwebbed within various bodies, dispersed and unlocatable in any “subject.” Rather than heterogeneous elements of an interaction where bodies and things maintain a level of independence, everything is communicating and agency emerges from the relationships in intra-actions (Barad, 2020). Barad (2020) writes,Virtual particles are not in the void but of the void. They are on the razor edge of non/being. The void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The vacuum is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what could be. The quiet cacophony of different frequencies, pitches, tempos, melodies, noises… are threaded through the silence, ready to erupt, but simultaneously crosscut by a disruption, dissipating, dispersing the would-be sound into non/being, anindeterminate symphony of voices. The blank page teeming with the desires of would be traces of every symbol, equation, word, book, library, punctuation mark, vowel, diagram, scribble, inscription, graphic, letter, inkblot, as they yearn toward expression. A jubilation of emptiness. (para. 14)The poetics of the would be and no-thingness is striking in this passage, entanglement preceding thingness. And in the arts or arts’ agencialities mingled with those of other participants, there are endless counter-narratives and possibilities in being and spaces for changing/becoming.As expressive arts therapists, an ethic of care requires listening across species, across matter, across harm, with arts-based psychotherapeutic pedagogies that make space for creativity and a wider frame of care. The arts have their own addressive and magnetic power, and in the phenomenological theories that inform EXA, one does not analyze and explain. Rather, one describes, thus returning to the things themselves. We see this enacted in what is referred to as the architecture of a session88The architecture of a session was developed by Paolo Knill and refers to the phases that EXA practitioners might use when working with clients. For more information, see Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy (2005), and Solution Art: A Textbook of Art and Resource-Orientated Work (2023)., where clients are invited to extend the dialogue towards things, as they are sensitized to the material(s) and turned to engagement through their senses. Tronto states that humans are both caregivers and care receivers (with therapists, psychologists, etc., generally considered elevated, paid caregivers, without completion/recognition of a circle of care in which they are also active participants in care receiving). As to care in the Anthropocene, humans are care receivers from the material world but generally speaking, bad caregivers and stewards of the land (Stevens & Wainwright, 2020); consider the multitude of accelerated ecological disasters, the dark heart of the apocalypse revealing itself repeatedly through the hollowed out, mined and stripped landscapes, the bombs and shrapnel, sharp as razor blades. Where/what is the heart of the matter when we consider how mental health issues seem in part tied to the Cartesian logic of subject/object dualisms, a world made sick by late-stage capitalism’s refusal to address our entangled concerns?Planning and Resistance: The Future of Expressive Arts TherapyKaren Barad’s concept of intra-action is crucial to understanding how the material and the discursive relate. Like artistic processes, Barad challenges us to view our therapeutic encounters as intra-connected phenomena rather than isolated actions. As the Anthropocene unfolds, this material-discursive entanglement becomes an ethical imperative, compelling EXA practitioners to consider broader ecological and material contexts in their work. How can EXA therapists in their itinerant and improvisational way be intra-actively involved in shaping the present and future with a multiplicity of others in spaces of liberation and creativity? What is the role of the EXA therapist in supporting responsive relations, co-compositions of ethical responsibility between and within us, from being to action—intra-activities bound up in a community ethos of care and interconnectedness?Building on this, theorists such as Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway push us beyond human-centered perspectives, inviting us to consider EXA as a practice deeply embedded in the material and non-human world. Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis —making-with—forces us to reconsider our interdependence with other beings, technologies, and environments. Likewise, Braidotti’s posthumanism suggests that EXA can be a site for exploring new relationships between human and non-human entities, transcending the boundaries between self and world.To respond to shifting ontological, ethical, and ecological concerns, EXA must integrate multiple theoretical frameworks. Drawing inspiration from Paolo Knill’s Magic Underworld , we recognize that the arts provide a space where rationality dissolves, allowing deeper, often unnoticed, transformations to occur. In Knill’s vision of the Underworld, embracing the unknown, the unnameable, and the chaotic can be therapeutic—a theme that resonates with contemporary calls for embracing uncertainty and complexity in EXA practice. Through Harney and Moten’s envisaging of the Undercommons, we can rethink how we approach community and resistance within therapeutic settings. They challenge us to reconsider therapeutic frameworks that prioritize individualism in favor of ungovernable spaces of collective action. Within the Undercommons, arts becomes a mode of resistance, a way to sustain communities that defy conventional structures. In this way, EXA can offer spaces where marginal voices and unacknowledged narratives can be shared, transforming both personal and collective experiences.Post-humanism and new materialism by way of Winnicott (1971a) allow us to image a path forward, towards the not-yet-known, to do something generative and creative in these shared transitional, play spaces, where “…if we wish, we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences. This is a natural root of grouping among human beings” (p. 4). By illusory, Winnicott meant “the substance of illusion” (p. 3), with adults having the ability to form groups, some of which naturally find unexpected location and composition for play. 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This paper looks into evolving practices in arts-based research through the lens of Posthuman Arts-Based Inquiry (PABI) and its principle of experimental recombinatoriality, referred to here as “riffology.” By pushing back on anthropocentric assumptions, PABI brings in human, and nonhuman, forces alike, generating a more expansive approach to creativity and knowledge production. Drawing on DeleuzoGuattarian philosophy, new materialist perspectives, and post-qualitative research, we treat art-making as an ontological event rather than mere representation. In doing so, PABI challenges established boundaries within arts-based research, foregrounding shared agencies and ethical obligations that extend across human, technological, and ecological domains. Through practical examples and theoretical grounding, this paper demonstrates how PABI reimagines creative inquiry amid planetary crises, ultimately offering a posthuman critical pedagogy with the potential to transform both educational and societal landscapes.Keywords:Posthuman arts-based inquiry, posthuman critical pedagogy, DeleuzoGuattarian philosophy, assemblage theory, arts-based research (ABR), AnthropoceneIntroductionIn recent decades, dialogues surrounding the Anthropocene and posthumanism have prompted re-thinking of how we approach , research, and creativity, particularly the entanglements between human and nonhuman entities (Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016). Traditional research methodologies, deeply rooted in humanist frameworks, are increasingly disrupted to accommodate the fluidities and complexities of our contemporary era. In response, arts-based research (ABR) has evolved as a set of methodologies that draw upon artistic processes across visual, performative, literary, and sonic domains to produce non-traditional forms of knowledge (Barone & Eisner, 2011; Leavy, 2017). However, much of ABR focus primarily on the human subject, emphasizing empathy, interpersonal meaning-making, and the amplification of personal narratives.Posthuman Arts-Based Inquiry (PABI) takes shape as a conceptual approach that broadens and reworks traditional ABR methods to respond to broader ontological and epistemological shifts that decenter the human subject. grounded in diverse theoretical traditions—including DeleuzGuattarian philosophy, new materialism, post-qualitative research, speculative realism, and remix culture—PABI underscores the complex, relational dynamics that disturb anthropocentric norms (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2016). Core concepts such as assemblage, becoming, and deterritorialization bring into relief the interconnectedness of all entities, disputing the idea that humans are the sole drivers of creativity and knowledge production (Haraway, 2016; McBrien, 2016).Within PABI, the generative impulses traditionally emphasized in ABR are redirected to include a broader range of entanglements among human, and nonhuman participants. For example, the concept of “riffology”—borrowed from remix culture—advocates an open-ended research approach, where researcher-artists engage with unfolding forces to create new ways of seeing and being (Wainwright & Stevens, 2017). These post-qualitative stances resonate with posthuman inquiry, which departs from linear, anthropocentric meaning-making toward exploring how multiple agencies interact and inform one another.This paper strives to map out the conceptual lineage of PABI and show how it reconfigures ABR toward more inclusive, posthuman horizons. By taking on the expansive framework of PABI, we not only incorporate machinic elements and hybrid ontologies but also integrate feminist new materialism, quantum views of matter (Barad, 2007), and ecosophical thought (Morton, 2013). These theoretical strands converge to fundamentally rethink creativity, representation, and knowledge production. PABI pushes the conversation to include diverse genealogies that further enrich and challenge anthropocentric assumptions.We start by mapping the long-standing legacy of ABR within educational and interdisciplinary contexts before unpacking how posthuman critiques of anthropocentrism invite new framings of art and research. We then consider the value of experimental recombinatoriality—what we term “riffing”—in encouraging innovative posthuman inquiry. Finally, we reflect on the consequences of adopting PABI amid planetary crises, proposing a posthuman critical pedagogy that centers on emergence, interconnectedness, and relational ethics.From Humanism to PosthumanismABR originated from a broader qualitative shift in the social sciences that began in the mid-twentieth century and grew in influence toward the century’s end (Barone & Eisner, 2011). Researchers employ the arts—poetry, visual arts, dance, music—to represent experiences, elicit emotional resonance, and create empathetic connections between participants and audiences. Barone and Eisner (2011) describe ABR as an approach “enlarge[ing] human understanding” (pp. 8–9), with art functioning as a conduit to express subjective realities that might otherwise remain out of reach, or underrepresented in traditional research outputs. In the humanist context, the goal of ABR is often to “create an expressive form” that encourages “empathetic participation” in the lives of others (Barone & Eisner, 2011, p. 8).Over the years, numerous iterations of ABR have emerged, each with its own conceptual underpinnings and practical emphasis. For example, a/r/tography (Springgay et al., 2007) weaves the roles of artist, researcher, and teacher, emphasizing the “in-between” spaces where creative practice interacts with teaching and scholarship. Poetic inquiry (Prendergast et al., 2009; Galvin & Prendergast, 2016) draws upon the affective power of poetry to express subtle human experiences and emotional truths. Despite their differences, these and other ABR methods maintain a human-centered viewpoint: an emphasis on individual viewpoint, empathy, and the expanding of human understanding through creative expression (Leavy, 2017).While humanistic ABR has led to a wide range of insights, it faces growing critique from posthuman scholarship (Braidotti, 2013; Haraway, 2016a). Posthumanism doesn’t entirely reject the significance of human-centered art-making but suggests that strictly anthropocentric frameworks can overlook the complex interconnections shaping our world. Thinkers like Rosi Braidotti (2013) challenge the Enlightenment-era notion of an individual, autonomous, rational subject, arguing it fails to match a planet where humans, animals, technologies, and environments are closely interwoven. Likewise, Karen Barad (2007) proposes an onto-epistemological stance on matter and meaning, holding that the lines between subject and object are continually being formed rather than assumed as fixed.Such shifts spur a new examination of how we grasp creativity, knowledge, and our ties to one another. In posthuman models, human agency is only one element among many agential forces including nonhuman animals, tech-based networks built environments, microorganisms, and planet-altering forces (Bennett, 2010). The so-called Anthropocene—or what Haraway (2016) reframes as the Chthulucene—amplifies our awareness of these entangled relationships by exposing the destructive consequences of human activity on global ecologies. As a result, posthuman scholarship serves not merely as an scholarly project but also as a call to action pressing us to take fully into account the more-than-human communities coexisting on our planet.Experimental Recombinatoriality and RiffologyPABI comes about as a methodological response to the question: How can we do arts-based research that properly accounts for the agency of nonhuman forces, while encouraging fresh forms of thought?The concept of experimental recombinatoriality, introduced by Wainwright and Stevens (2016), invites researchers to become “riffologists”—similar to DJs sampling music—by mixing diverse elements such as theory, art materials, and technology. This “plug in and play” ethos (Wainwright & Stevens, 2020) fits with posthuman approaches that emphasize relationality and emergence. Rather than using a fixed approach, PABI favors open systems in which human, nonhuman, and conceptual forces interact to produce surprising, innovative outcomes.Riffology therefore pushes back against the idea that the researcher is just an observer, highlighting researcher-as-participant in fluid networks of becoming. Its free-flowing and unplanned style to knowledge creation resonates with post-qualitative approaches, which critiques rigid methodologies and stable categories (St. Pierre, 2011). Postqualitative scholarship likewise questions the idea that data exist “out there” to be collected or that human experiences alone form the core of understanding. Instead, it reveals how phenomena, subjects, and objects continuously co-create each other . Working alongside with postqualitative perspectives, PABI provides a direct line of flight from conventional ABR: no longer centered mainly on expressing human experiences, it becomes an assemblage that actively generates new ways of thinking and being.Arts-Based Research Revisited: Expanding the Frame ABR has a long-standing tradition of resisting positivistic frameworks and championing embodied, emotive, and nuanced ways of knowing (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Leavy, 2017). Whether through stage-based performance or a collection of poetic reflections ABR has widened scholarly conversations by introducing the aesthetic, the emotional, and the sensory. By engaging multiple senses, ABR methodologies can create voices/realities on the margins and foster deeper empathy. As a result, ABR has been applied in educational research, social justice projects, therapy and counseling contexts, community engagement, and more (McNiff, 1998; Rolling, 2013).Still, some critiques of ABR note potential blind spots, particularly its deeply humanistic underpinnings. While empathy and personal expression are extremely important, they risk becoming anthropocentric if creation centers only on human experiences. By extension, arts-based studies that overlook nonhuman or inhuman participants—whether technologies, materials, ecologies, or other living systems —may unintentionally strengthen assumptions about human primacy. For example, an arts-based project on climate change might showcase human stories but overlook the roles of glaciers, coral reefs, or microbial life that also shape the planetary crisis.Posthuman critiques thus call for for a broader perspective that recognizes the entangled presence and influence of nonhumans in research. By challenging long-entrenched anthropocentric values, posthuman thought broadens ABR’s reach beyond human stories and toward a more far-reaching understanding of how life forms, technologies, and ecosystems guide artistic processes.Emergence of Posthuman Arts-Based Inquiry (PABI)PABI takes ABR one step beyond: rather than focusing on broadening human understanding, it aims to resituate the human within a larger relational web. Drawing on DeleuzoGuattarian thought, PABI positions art as an assemblage of affects, percepts, concepts, and materials that generate new realities rather than simply representing existing ones (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). In concert with new materialist perspectives (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010), PABI researchers attend to how matter, bodies, technologies, and discourses co-constitute the phenomena under study. This approach insists that neither “the human” nor “the artistic process” stands as an isolated entity. Instead, creativity emerges from vibrant interrelations among diverse actants, including but not limited to the researcher-artist.In turning toward the posthuman, PABI deviates from linear narratives of meaning-making. The open and improvisational dimension of the approach cultivates dynamic engagements with materials and theories. For example, a PABI project investigating oceanic pollution might involve not only painting or sculpture but also data sets on microplastics, wave patterns, maritime technologies, and the generative presence of sea life. By assembling this array of forces, the inquiry yields an understanding—an “onto-epistemological moment” (Barad, 2007)—that extends beyond purely human concerns, taking into account the multiplicities at play. Posthuman Critical PedagogyWithin the educational sphere, PABI directly bolsters a posthuman critical pedagogy (Braidotti, 2013). This perspective contests the hierarchical frameworks in which humans occupy the apex of cognitive or moral worth and works to embrace nonhuman elements into the conceptualization of learning. A posthuman pedagogical stance might, for instance, ask students to collaborate with more-than-human entities—like local flora, technological mediators, or intangible digital networks—to co-produce knowledge, rather than simply studying these entities as passive objects.Haraway’s (2016) emphasis on “making kin” connects with the idea that arts-based practices can forge new alliances and affiliations that disrupt anthropocentrism. The classroom or studio environment thereby transforms into an assemblage that continuously configures and reconfigures participants’ relationships with the world. In this sense, the educator becomes a facilitator of emergent relations, attuning to how the distributed agencies of the classroom—human students, nonhuman tools, transient affects, architectural space—converge into unique learning events. Such a stance profoundly reimagines teacher-student roles, disciplinary boundaries, and outcomes by valuing the emergent complexity of learning.Planetary Stakes: The Anthropocene ContextAnother dimension of PABI is its potential to respond to the urgent socio-ecological crises of the Anthropocene. Many arts-based projects have engaged with climate change, extinction, and environmental justice; PABI, however, underscores that these issues are jointly shaped by a panoply of agents, beyond the category of “human” alone (McBrien, 2016). By recasting the Earth as a vibrant participant rather than a passive backdrop, PABI research can catalyze innovative forms of art-making that bring forward entangled vulnerabilities. Artists might, for instance, explore the voices or agencies of rivers, coral reefs, or methane-capturing technologies, not as inert subjects to be represented but as collaborators in a shared creative process. Timothy Morton (2013) invokes the concept of “hyperobjects” to describe phenomena like climate change and plastic pollution that exceed human grasp yet permeate everyday life. PABI thus encourages an aesthetic strategy that grapples with scale, complexity, and the expansive temporalities of these hyperobjects, providing fresh perspectives on the Anthropocene.PABI builds on the strengths of arts-based research—its sense-driven methods, its capacity for insight, and its generative potential—and amplifies them through a posthuman lens. By reworking how knowledge is formed and who or what participates in that formation, PABI opens new avenues for creative engagement with the world’s urgencies. It positions ABR as a site of ongoing experimentation, not just with artistic tools but also with the very conceptual frameworks we adopt to understand ourselves and our planetary entanglements.Anthropocentric Conditions and Shifts in PerspectiveAnthropocentrism—that is, situating the human subject at the core of inquiry—has been critiqued within diverse philosophical, scientific, and cultural spheres, particularly in light of the ecological upheavals of the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2016a; Morton, 2013). The advent of posthumanism and new materialism into academic discourse has brought attention to the agency and vitality of matter, destabilizing the long-held assumption that humans occupy a privileged vantage. Consequently, many have begun to question how knowledge production might transform if we regard animals, plants, machines, and geological phenomena as co-collaborators or co-agents rather than passive contexts or resources.Within the arts, anthropocentric perspectives often take shape as a focus on human experiences, expressions, and emotions—understandable given the anthropological impetus behind many creative traditions. Nevertheless, emerging art practices increasingly take up interaction with environmental or technological landscapes that move the spotlight from purely human stories to broader constellations of relationship. Examples include bioart projects that involve bacterial cultures or living organisms as active creative participants, or new media arts that highlight the co-creative role of algorithms, machine learning, and digital networks. Posthuman theoretical frames legitimize these expanded forms of creativity, stressing that “art” can be generated from more-than-human interactions (jagodzinski, 2017).Forces of DeterritorializationDeleuzoGuattarian concepts such as deterritorialization and assemblage help explain how art and research might push against anthropocentrism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Deterritorialization involves breaking away from habitual territory—be it conceptual, cultural, or physical—and moving toward new ways of relating. Within a PABI context, deterritorialization might describe how a group of researchers and participants forms a short-term collaborative group that includes not only human bodies but also the environment, digital technologies, and immaterial forces such as mood or memory. This process unsettles straightforward anthropocentric notions of artistic agency, uncovering it as distributed and emergent.For example, a collaborative dance project looking into climate anxiety could bring together the physical environment (e.g., beach shorelines, rising tides), wearable technologies that respond to dancers’ biometric data, and real-time audience feedback transmitted via social media. Under a traditional arts-based research view, these elements might be seen as external frameworks serving the central thematic of human expression. In a PABI lens, however, these elements are acknowledged as co-contributors that transform the nature of the dancing, the performance, and the knowledge produced. The movement is not strictly about the dancers’ emotional states; it is co-emerging from the interplay of bodies, tides, sensor data, spontaneous choreography, and fleeting crowd responses.Relational Ethics and the NonhumanAnother facet of this decentering involves a deepening focus on relational ethics. Posthuman scholarship calls for a moral stance that views all entities as interwoven, spurring thoughtful consideration on how our creative or research activities affect various agents (Barad, 2007). In a PABI project, for instance, ethical considerations might involve looking into whether specific technologies or materials might unintentionally perpetuate unfair labor, or how site-specific art installations could disrupt nearby ecosystems. Rather than casting the researcher as a detached organizer, a posthuman view situates them within a web of responsibilities and interdependencies.Donna Haraway’s (2016) idea of “staying with the troubles” fits well here, suggesting that researchers should remain receptive to the unease and unpredictability that come with recognizing these interconnections. By doing so, we release the reassuring but false notion that the researcher can remain neutral or completely in charge. This ethical orientation opens a path for more substantial collaborations across species and across academic and non-academic fields (e.g., scientists, environmental activists, philosophers, local communities). As a result, PABI serves not only as a way of knowing (epistemic) but also as a way of engaging and responding (ethical-political).Planetary FuturesIf the Anthropocene marks the geologic era most shaped by human activity, it also calls for urgent rethinking of how cultural, aesthetic, and academic endeavors might be transformed to address planetary challenges (McBrien, 2016). By decentering humans in arts-based inquiry, PABI fosters a multi-perspectival engagement with ecological crisis, whether that involves foregrounding the voices of marginalized human communities or acknowledging the agencies of ocean currents, arctic glaciers, or pollinating insects. In the context of “hyperobjects” (Morton, 2013) such as global warming or microplastics in oceans, posthuman approaches help us conceptualize phenomena that are both intimately close and impossibly vast.In this sense, PABI serves a philosophical imperative to catalyze new lines of flight—new ways of imagining futures that do not revolve around human exceptionalism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). While it does not promise an immediate solution to the planet’s ills, PABI positions creative inquiry as a generative force for reconceptualizing the relationship between the arts, the sciences, and the environment. It does so by honoring the emergent forces that shape reality from the microbial to the cosmic, from the digital to the corporeal.Taken together, these shifts away from anthropocentrism and toward a posthuman awareness emphasize the relevance of PABI in contemporary discourses. It rearranges old assumptions about where knowledge resides, how it is produced, and whose voices matter in the telling. As we proceed, we will examine more closely the methodological and conceptual tools PABI draws on to guide research processes that remain open, improvisational, and collaborative—hallmarks of experimental recombinatoriality and the riffological approach.The Practice of Riffology: Experimental Methodologies in PABIBecause PABI is grounded in posthuman theory, capturing what is “out there” isn’t its primary goal. Instead, the research-creation process becomes a space where ontological changes unfold (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994). For example, a PABI project might not set out to portray or document the challenges of coral reefs; rather, it brings the reef’s organisms, rhythms, and vulnerabilities into conversation with humans, materials, and ideas. The reef shifts from being a passive subject to an active participant.On the ground, the outcome might depart from a straightforward documentary-style painting, becoming instead an interactive installation that weaves together underwater sound recordings, data visualizations of coral bleaching, touchable sculptures modeled after reef formations, and real-time observations from marine scientists.Within this framework, knowledge emerges as an event—a convergence of intensities—rather than an external discovery. This perspective corresponds with the new materialist view that matter itself possesses agency (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010). Accordingly, riffology in PABI highlights how artistic encounters can spark new connections, emotions, and ideas, prompting us toward fresh ethical and political possibilities.Post-Qualitative SynergiesThe synergy between PABI and post-qualitative research cannot be overstated, as both question the assumption that the core task of research is to represent “data” in a fixed form. Instead, they highlight the open-endedness of inquiry, where new questions constantly arise, reshaping the research act (St. Pierre, 2011). In a post-qualitative orientation, coding schemes and categories used to analyze data are not fixed in advance but often emerge—or even dissolve—through the creative process. Similarly, PABI’s riffological approach views methodological frameworks as flexible architectures that adapt to the contingencies of a research event.For instance, in a post-qualitative/PABI project centered on the nexus of mental health and urban ecology, participants might be invited to create ephemeral sculptures from found materials in abandoned city lots. The researcher could also track the environmental conditions—temperatures, wind patterns, soil health—and integrate these with participants’ bodily movements or emotional states. Rather than using a rigid procedure to measure “outcomes,” the project might generate a shifting assemblage of audio recordings, site-specific sculptures, emotional reflections, and theoretical readings. These different elements become entangled, shaping the emergent knowledge in ways that no single dimension could predefine.Riffology and Transdisciplinary AssemblagesOne notable characteristic of PABI is its openness to transdisciplinary collaborations (Leavy, 2017). While ABR is already multidisciplinary in nature, PABI’s posthuman outlook expands these boundaries further by incorporating ecology, biology, artificial intelligence, geology, and other fields that foreground nonhuman processes. Riffology easily works with these inputs, inviting participants from diverse domains to “sample” each other’s ideas, techniques, and knowledge. Such cross-pollination frequently yields unexpected insights or experimental forms.This transdisciplinary impetus has major pedagogical implications. In an educational setting, a PABI workshop might bring together art students, engineering majors, environmental science researchers, and local community activists to investigate a specific issue like urban waste management. Their different knowledge bases serve as the palette for collective riffing, combining data visualization, found-object sculpture, industrial design prototypes, and community storytelling sessions. The posthuman viewpoint emphasizes that a city’s waste is not just a byproduct of human consumption but also a web of objects, machines, microbes, and biochemical processes mingling in landfills and watersheds. By centering these nonhuman agencies, the group co-develops a far-reaching artistic intervention that crosses the usual borders of art or social science.Ultimately, riffology embodies the open-ended, improvisational nature of PABI. It is a methodology of continuous invention, where the “rules” are contingent on the emergent properties of each project. While this can present challenges—lack of pre-structured guidelines, difficulty in standard evaluation—it also creates an arena of creative freedom that can yield radically transformative outcomes. By enacting posthuman principles through practice, PABI fosters a kind of research that is not just about new knowledge, but about new ways of being and relating in a world co-inhabited by uncountable forms of life and matter.Posthuman Critical Pedagogy: Learning Beyond the HumanCritical pedagogy historically centers on human emancipation, consciousness-raising, and social justice (Freire, 2000). While these pursuits continue to be vital, posthuman scholars have pointed out that strict humanism can inadvertently discount other forms of life, matter, and intelligence. A posthuman critical pedagogy, therefore, does not ignore human oppression or experiences; rather, it extends the horizon of ethical and political consideration to include nonhumans (Braidotti, 2013). This move entails recognizing that learning unfolds not only through human-to-human interaction but also through ongoing, often unpredictable, entanglements with animal others, technological devices, natural phenomena, and so forth.PABI in Educational ContextsPABI provides concrete strategies for activating posthuman critical pedagogy across formal and informal learning environments. Instead of focusing only on human expression, educators might design art-based projects in which materials, spaces, and technologies are acknowledged as co-teachers. These examples illustrate how PABI, with its ethos of experimentation and entanglement, can empower educators and learners to go beyond anthropocentrism. The learning experience is recast as a process of becoming-with other agents, recognizing that knowledge and meaning are not exclusive to humans.Researcher Reflexivity and Ethical AccountabilityA posthuman pedagogy invites educators and researchers to broaden their understanding of reflexivity, an essential aspect of both critical pedagogy and qualitative research. Traditionally, reflexivity focuses on the researcher’s self-awareness of personal preconceptions and positionalities, but PABI pushes beyond this by also examining how nonhuman factors influence—and are influenced by —the work. This perspective invites questions like: How might the research site’s location affect local wildlife? How might specific materials alter the ecosystem’s balance? How do classroom technologies rework the socio-material environment?Looking at ethics more expansively can result in more mindful decisions, such as choosing earth-friendly art supplies or creating alliances that put environmental health first. Continuing this idea, Haraway’s (2016) call to “stay with the troubles” prompt educators and researchers to steer clear of quick solutions, instead treating complexity and unresolved tensions as continuous opportunities for exploration.Potential for Social-Ecological TransformationLastly, PABI’s posthuman perspective does not dismiss the social justice foundations of critical pedagogy; rather, it builds on it. When grappling with challenges like climate disparity or limited resources, PABI fosters conversations that include both human stakeholders (often unevenly impacted) and nonhuman entities (ecosystems, animals, infrastructures). By doing this, it positions educational efforts in a global frame, underscoring the undeniable interdependence between human well-being and the rest of the biosphere. With this posthuman orientation, PABI enables collaborative processes that question the human-nonhuman divide. It offers a compelling framework for responding to contemporary crises in ways that are inclusive, imaginative, and transformative.Forceworking and the Production of ThoughtAs researchers and artists shift from representation to creation, the concept of “forcework” helps describe how art actively intervenes in social and material contexts (Ziarek, 2004). In the realm of PABI, forcework refers to the harnessing of diverse agencies—human, nonhuman, conceptual, material—that come together around artistic processes. Unlike a conventional understanding of an “artwork” as an object for passive consumption, forcework underscores dynamic encounters that disrupt, reconfigure, and activate creative potentials.Deleuze and Guattari (1987) similarly emphasize that art does not merely reproduce the visible or audible; rather, it renders forces visible or audible, forging new intensities. This orientation is crucial in a posthuman context, where recognition of nonhuman influences requires that art be seen as co-constructed from a multiplicity of sources. In other words, the “work” is not just performed by the human artist but by the synergy of multiple forces—machines, ecosystems, cultural codes, weather patterns, affects, rhythms, and more.Affect, Percept, and ConceptA key DeleuzoGuattarian insight is that art produces affects and percepts, while philosophy generates concepts (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994). This posthuman approach to arts-based research merges these distinctions by bringing creative processes into contact with philosophical reflection, thus producing a “force of art” that also has conceptual power (Massumi, 2002). In a PABI context, a single installation or performance may elicit potent affective resonances (e.g., awe, discomfort, surprise) and yield emergent concepts (e.g., rethinking boundaries between organic and synthetic life).This dynamic interplay is not limited to human cognition; the environment and materials actively shape how these affects and percepts take form. For instance, a sculptural piece composed of biodegradable plastics might “fail” or degrade more rapidly than anticipated under certain conditions, generating novel conceptual tensions about impermanence, sustainability, and the role of entropy in creative practice. Such an outcome attests to the entangled, vibrant matter at work (Bennett, 2010).Generating Thought Through ArtIn conventional academic discourse, knowledge production can be regarded as distinct from art-making, reducing art to an illustrative or decorative role. In PABI, however, the generation of thought through art is central (Braidotti, 2013). This orientation aligns with the idea that creative practice can spark new philosophical positions without having to “render” them into conventional academic language. The material and affective experiences of art themselves may constitute thought-in-action.For example, imagine a PABI project where participants generate wearable robotic sculptures that react to local air quality indices. As the air pollution levels change, the sculptures morph, emitting mechanical whirs, pulses of colored light, or shifts in shape. Observers experience a literal embodiment of the environment’s shifting chemical composition, sparking spontaneous reflections on how human health, industrial processes, and atmospheric conditions co-inhabit local space. These reflections are not mere add-ons but central to the conceptual yield of the art event: participants come away with a richer, multi-sensory understanding of pollution that cannot be fully captured by numeric data alone. By rendering that data “felt” and “seen,” the art does philosophical work, weaving affects, percepts, and conceptual lines of flight.Toward Posthuman ImaginariesBy making possible g the co-production of forces, PABI seeks to shape posthuman imaginaries that upend and stretch our sense of collective possibility. Far from trivial, these imaginaries can inform policy debates, communal decisions, and ethical frameworks by pointing attention to non-traditional ways of organizing social and environmental life. In this sense, the forcework realized in PABI is not only aesthetic but also political, linking art’s capacity for igniting g imaginative leaps with the urgent need for systemic transformation in the face of planetary challenges (Haraway, 2016).Future Directions Throughout this paper, we have argued for the conceptual and practical shift from conventional humanist ABR to what we term Posthuman Arts-Based Inquiry (PABI). Building upon and expanding upon the original impetus of ABR to cultivate richer, more empathic understandings of human experience, PABI tackles the growing recognition that we exist within a vast network of interlinked forces—both biotic and abiotic, organic and technological, individual and collective. DeleuzoGuattarian philosophy offers a conceptual scaffold for rethinking creativity as something that arises from assemblages of bodies, materials, spaces, and affects, rather than from singular human subjectivities (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Meanwhile, new materialist and post-qualitative discourses emphasize how matter and meaning are intertwined, exposing the agency of nonhuman agents in processes of knowledge formation (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; St. Pierre, 2011).We have highlighted the function of experimental recombinatoriality —“riffology”—as a hallmark methodology within PABI. This approach calls for open systems of inquiry where creativity unfolds from the interplay of participants, theoretical concepts, materials, site conditions, and nonhuman agencies. In line with postqualitative research, it challenges the fixity of standard methods, calling instead for fluid, adaptive engagements. In so doing, PABI disrupts anthropocentric assumptions, reminding us that art is not merely a human endeavor and that knowledge evolves through entangled events involving multiple actants.Reflecting on the Anthropocene ChallengeOne of the most pressing concerns for PABI is the Anthropocene, which highlights the magnitude to which human actions have irrevocably transformed planetary systems. While some question the anthropocentrism implicit in naming an epoch after “anthropos,” the term drives home the seriousness of human-induced global effects (McBrien, 2016). PABI responds by requiring that arts-based researchers adopt a planetary perspective, seeing themselves as enmeshed in flows of matter and energy that do not begin or end with the human. If the Anthropocene is characterized by climate breakdown, environmental degradation, and rampant extinction, PABI’s relational ethos inspire creative and research-driven interventions that draw attention to new forms of collective care and cross-species solidarity.As illustrated by Haraway (2016), the Chthulucene framework moves us away from mere doom-and-gloom scenarios toward “making kin,” or forging unexpected but deeply necessary alliances across species, cultures, and technologies. PABI’s exploratory approach complements this viewpoint by championing open-ended inquiry where new alliances can emerge organically. Collaborative projects that involve local communities, scientists, artists, and nonhumans can gestate novel solutions or at least provoke a deeper sense of accountability and imagination. In short, PABI fosters the kind of creative, multi-actor synergy essential for contending with the planetary crisis.ConclusionsPosthuman Arts-Based Inquiry deepens the tradition of arts-based research by reorienting its philosophical and practical orientation away from humanist assumptions and toward a more far reaching understanding of relational being. Its philosophical heart beats with DeleuzoGuattarian undertones, new materialist calls to entangle matter and meaning, and speculative realist provocations to let objects and forces speak. Its methodological soul dwells in riffology, a processual and improvisational practice that welcomes both predictable and wildly unpredictable co-creations from humans, objects, ecologies, and technologies.PABI is thus an invitation to expand the arena of creative inquiry, acknowledging that art-making, knowledge-production, and learning are collaborative events orchestrated by many agents—some conscious, some not, some organic, some not. It presses us to think morally and ethically about how we position ourselves within these entanglements and urges us to shape our inquiries and interventions with humility and openness. While many questions remain regarding the practicalities of implementing posthuman frameworks in conservative institutional contexts or bridging the gap between activism and academia, the potential for transformative learning and research is immense.By placing arts-based inquiry within posthuman sensibilities, we not only expand the scope of ABR but also reaffirm the critical importance of creative experimentation in times of planetary uncertainty. PABI positions itself at the frontier of transdisciplinary research, calling for a future in which art, science, philosophy, and activism converge in shared acts of becoming—together forging pathways that transcend anthropocentric limitations and open new vistas of relational knowledge.ReferencesBarad, K. (2007). 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In an era defined by elusive post-truth conditions, illusions and trickery saturate public discourse—circulating with breathtaking speed, overshadowing sustained reflection, and igniting cultural divides. Drawing on select posthuman perspectives and Marshall McLuhan’s figure/ground analysis, this article explores how illusions become events in which truths are simultaneously asserted, obscured, and transformed. Rather than dismiss illusions as mere deception or lapse in rationality, I consider them emergent phenomena co-produced by humans, machines, and intangible intensities—fueling a new “shock-shrug” cycle of ephemeral attention. As cynicism or confusion easily follow, an ethic of re/truthing offers an alternative mode of inquiry: one that refuses naive faith in universal truths while pursuing genealogical mappings of illusions to retain possibilities for critical engagement. I examine these dynamics through concepts such as ephemeral intensities, comedic appropriation, and the overshadowing of ecological crises. Ultimately, illusions require genealogical approaches to memory, shifting our educational engagements beyond linear corrections toward collaborative sense-making across human and nonhuman entanglements.