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• 1 2025-05-12T15:11:18+00:00 Work like water 6 plain 2025-05-13T22:26:34+00:00 Dear Jolene,
  
  We used to try to understand the way our VR world, Memory Eternal, worked through the idea of emergence. Working in research-creation modes, we argued, dictated the creation and development of the world, but retroactive theorization of the work draws out the entanglements not only between the world’s technical-conceptual elements, but also between the theorists and the immersants, the text and the immersant, the theorists to others, in a generative fashion.
  
  You remember Natalie Loveless talking about emergence and surprised to find her referring to Donna Haraway and Lynn Margulis' turn to the language of water and symbiosis: 

  "In The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway writes: “The obligation is to ask who are present and who are emergent. . . . Situated emergence of more livable worlds depends on that differential sensibility” (50–51). This term—emergent—is peppered throughout Companion Species, and it is often paired with symbiogenesis. The terms rhyme conceptually. While symbiogenesis, forwarded by the evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis ([1967] 1993), speaks to the relational origin of organisms (an understanding of the contested distinction species as emerging through symbiosis rather than mutation), emergence describes an aggregate property of elements, none of which demonstrate that property inherently within them. Water, in its liquid form, and snowflakes, as specific crystallized forms, exhibit compound properties that are not seen at the (molecular) levels below. Water is emergent. So are snowflakes. Emergence is relevant to research-creation not only because it is a recurring descriptor in writing on research-creation and its synonyms—which it is—but because it refigures disciplinary research objects in ways that invite us to think interdisciplinarity-as-emergence: as productive of outputs that exceed what is demonstrably present in their constituent parts. An approach to research modelled on emergence insists on the complexity of lived histories and worlds, and on the difficulty of accounting for and responding to such complexity. It also insists on recognizing that this complexity is not simply a failure that adequate perspective—the capacity to somehow see better—might correct (what Haraway has called a God trick [1988, 582], the view of everything from nowhere), but rather that complexity is the name of the game, whether we are talking turtles (King 2003), elephants (Haraway 2003, 12), or metaplasm (54); it is “stories about stories, all the way down.”” (Loveless, 2019, p. 26)

  
  
  -M
  Loveless, Natalie. 2019. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Duke University Press.