Collision: Interarts Practice and Research

With very few exceptions, interdisciplinary art and interarts practices—examined as such, including the perspective of artist-researchers, and not subsumed under a singular category of performance or visual art—have, until now, been largely ignored. While it would be simplistic to think that this collection somehow rectifies the “piecemeal” status of this discourse, our wager is that this collection works towards presenting an understanding of this status as, in a certain sense, constitutive of the field.
Beginning with an introduction to the very multiplicities that compose and complicate interdisciplinary practices, then moving into questions of body/technology, location/movement, space/practice, performativity/aesthetics, this collection covers an enormous amount, while still retaining an overarching sense of unity in the context of the subject as a whole. Each of these sections negotiates a series of interrelated collisions in order to address a range of theoretical positions, as well as a variety of international and cultural perspectives. In addition to addressing the notion of interdisciplinarity and the challenges of specific interarts practices, this publication seeks to question how we might understand interarts practice in a way that does not exclude perspectives such as spirituality, law, political activism and community development, to name only a few. The inclusion of these disparate practices within this publication—itself a site of collision of the poetic, the conversational, and the theoretical—is thus not presented as an attempt to unify or normalize them, but rather as a productive charting of their radical explosion; a collision that is always a colliding.