Myco-scapes: Multispecies Entanglements in Artmaking is a body of ephemeral fiber sculptures. These weavings and digital fabrications are the result of collaborations with dynamic materials and other species, primarily fungi. The artworks (or artifacts) of the artist's material intra-actions explore the possibilities, challenges, and ethics of multispecies collaboration. Furthermore, in its ephemerality, Myco-scapes responds to the preventative conservation practices employed by art museums. Not only do these sculptures embody the fleeting nature of material entanglements, but they also challenge the capitalist structure of art collecting through their impermanence. The written thesis describes the artist's studio practice by exploring three primary influences: mycelium (the root-like structures of mushrooms), entanglements (the complex interwoven structures in which we exist), and preventative conservation (art-handling protocol designed to preserve artifacts). / Master of Fine Arts / Myco-scapes: Multispecies Entanglements in Artmaking is a body of ephemeral fiber sculptures. These weavings and digital fabrications are the result of collaborations with dynamic materials and other species, primarily fungi. The artworks (or artifacts) of the artist's material intra-actions explore the possibilities, challenges, and ethics of multispecies collaboration. Furthermore, in its ephemerality, Myco-scapes responds to the preventative conservation practices employed by art museums. Not only do these sculptures embody the fleeting nature of material entanglements, but they also challenge the capitalist structure of art collecting through their impermanence. The written thesis describes the artist's studio practice by exploring three primary influences: mycelium (the root-like structures of mushrooms), entanglements (the complex interwoven structures in which we exist), and preventative conservation (art-handling protocol designed to preserve artifacts).

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Clothes are the second skin on human bodies. By coming in contact with humans, clothes become a part of the body. Through the contact, clothes affect and enable human actions. This thesis investigates the relationship between human bodies and clothes by conducting interviews and wardrobe studies. Together with the informants and clothes, the exhibition “Fashioned from Nature” from The Victoria and Albert Museum is partly analyzed. The material is being interpreted in a critical analysis through theories on material agency and skin. The analysis turns to the culture and nature dualism, in order to highlight the neglected physical agency in clothing. Clothing’s agency is both physical and aesthetical. Neither of the aspects can be subordinate, nor superior, since clothes consist equally of both. Following the theories, clothing’s agency is being acknowledged through the encounters with humans. However, the results in this thesis show that clothing’s agency is ever present.

With this scientific essay I examine, what I choose to phrase as, music-centered educational practices in contemporary Swedish preschool. Using two personal experiences of these practices as empirical data, I aim to discern what types of philosophical and musicological ideas have helped shape their formation. One of the experiences used as empirical data is centered around a traditional educational practice, the song-gathering, and the other around an experimental practice of my own devising, the music-machine. Using my own term, music-centric educational practice, I explore different views on why music ought to be seen as a productive and valuable tool in regards to children’s education and development. I also compare the two main views, music as means to gain general knowledge and music as means to handle existential questions, only to find that they have more in common than one might think. The crucial factor is whether or not the teacher is aware of, and is able to handle, the philosophical implications. The essay is aimed to explore three main questions: What constitutes as the existential dimensions of music and what impact they might have on music-centric teaching, which criteria needs to be met in order to facilitate meaningful music-centric teaching and lastly what separates the idea of an existentially inclined music-centric teaching from the ideas of teaching-practice in a traditional sense. The essay, in its entirety, is an example of musico-philosophical thinking. I examine these questions with a view on music as a living organism, deriving philosophical ideas from new materialism and try to pin-point moments, where it could be argued that the impact of music is effecting and altering a persons state of mind. These instances I identify, using Roland Barthes terminology, as being in a state of jouissance. / Med denna vetenskapliga essä undersöker jag, vad jag vill kalla för, den musikcentrerade undervisningspraktiken i dagens svenska förskola. Med utgångspunkt i två egenupplevda situationer söker jag förstå vilka bakomliggande filosofiska och musikologiska idéströmningar som format dessa praktiker. Den ena situationen som används som empiriskt underlag kretsar kring en traditionell undervisningspraktik, sångsamlingen, och den andra kring en experimentell praktik som jag själv utformat, musikmaskinen. Med hjälp av mitt egna begrepp, musikcentrerad undervisning, utforskar jag olika idéer om varför musiken bör ses som ett produktivt och värdefullt verktyg i relation till barns bildning och utveckling. Jag jämför också de två huvudsakliga tankarna, musik som redskap för allmänbildning och musik som redskap för att hantera existentiella frågor, och finner att de båda synsätten har mer gemensamt än en först kan tro. Den avgörande faktorn är huruvida läraren är medveten om, och kan hantera, de olika filosofiska implikationerna. Denna essä är avsedd att utforska tre huvudfrågor: Vad som utgör musikens existentiella dimensioner och vilken konsekvens dessa har för den musikcentrerade undervisningen, vilka förutsättningar som krävs för att kunna bedriva en meningsfull musikcentrerad undervisning och slutligen vad som skiljer idén om en existentiellt betonad musikcentrerad undervisning från idéerna om undervisningspraktik i traditionell bemärkelse. Essän, i sin helhet, blir således ett exempel på musiskt-filosofiskt tänkande. Jag undersöker dessa frågor med en förståelse av musik som en levande organism, vilken är hämtad ur ett neomaterialistiskt perspektiv, och försöker peka ut de ögonblick då musiken kan sägas påverka och förändra en människas sinnestillstånd. Dessa ögonblick kallar jag, för att använda Roland Barthes terminologi, som förknippade med ett tillstånd av jouissance.

In this thesis project, the aim is to explore displacements beyond the familiar usage in migration studies associated with ’human’ by using a new materialist/s understanding ofontology and agency. This approach opens the possibility to move beyond the understanding of displacements as referring only to human agency. The fictionalised story, Parable of theSower, is used in the thesis as the real-world ontological world-building storytelling and the questions that flow from the aim of this thesis is used as a guiding navigator within the mainstory to see what other stories emerges; The Earthseed Story, The More-Than-Human Storiesand The Human Stories. Displacement(s) beyond human agency from a new materialist outlook show the complexity and challenges of being interconnected and codependent in a world containing multiple stories that move in and out of spacetime refuturing. This occursboth as dystopia and utopia, as agency is in-the-making and ongoing reshaping of territorialization and deterritorialization making all-the-flesh moving boundaries of being displaced and in-place in a belongings-non-belongings continuum. For future research,multispecies displacement(s) is discussed as ongoing processes of both; dystopian and utopian storytelling, and the possibilities for refuturing shared worlds.

The purpose of this research is to try to understand and be aware of what happens when space is transformed and the body becomes space. Space understood as the place where bodies and movement are situated or inhabit, commonly characterised as unlimited, continuous or three-dimensional, as well as, on the other hand, a limited surface with common purposes. The physical body understood as that with mass, energy and three-dimensionality, which does not distinguish between human and non-human, material and living. The manipulation of bodies as the action of manipulating with the hands, with other parts of the body or even with another instrument, is the idea of distorting reality, of transforming and transposing it. Through manipulation, or rather movement, space is changed and dialogues and stories are created. Since the concept of manipulation focuses on what the person wants to achieve, creating a hierarchy between bodies, and the concept of transformation can be understood as the exchange or dialogue between bodies, where everyone offers and receives, the term manipulation will be changed to transformation. Transforming space as a horizontal place where bodies and movement inhabit; understanding bodies as that human and non-human, material and living, and movement as the means by which they dialogue with each other and with space. The transformation of space as a leap from what has so far been known as the manipulation of objects, with the aim of understanding the relationship between bodies and space as a circus discipline through movement as dialogue. As an aerial harness dance artist working with suspension, distortion of reality and shifting perspectives between the vertical and horizontal plane, I seek to understand what happens to space when it is transformed through a series of methodologies and methods. The methodologies employed focus on the practice of circus and dance, spatial architecture, the art therapy and the adaptation of bodies as pedagogy. In terms of methods, there is a difference between those that already exist, such as the study of concepts and other projects, and others that emerge as a result of the research. The latter are new methods, concepts such as movement as dialogue, horizontality as a multidimensional space [the breaking down of boundaries between human - non-human and space – body], limitation and control as possibility, vulnerability as a potential, bodies as spaces; as well as pause, adaptation, installation and observation as means to understand the transformation of space and the body as space. Treat this study within the field of research of new materialism with the aim of developing the potential of interconnectedness, understood as that which reciprocally relates bodies occupying a space, and spaces occupying a body; the means of expression that arises between body and space; and the breaking down of barriers inside, such as between living and material bodies, space and body, or the human being and everything else; within the circus with the aim of transforming the space.

This dissertation is about new materialism as it relates to art education. It is a speculative inquiry that seeks to illuminate the interconnectivity of things by considering the ways in which things participate in generative practices of perceiving and making. To do so, the dissertation pioneers an arts-based methodology that allows for broad considerations about who and what can be considered an agent in the process of art making. In this inquiry, the researcher is an artist-participant with other more-than-human and human participants to construct an (im)material autohistoria-teoría, a revisionist interdisciplinary artwork inspired by the work of Anzaldúa. The term w/e is developed and discussed as new language for expanding upon Braidotti's posthumanist subjectivity. New theories called thing(k)ing (including found poetry) and (im)materiality are discussed as movements towards better understanding the contributions of the more-than-human in artmaking practices.

This essay examines the objects in Torgny Lindgren´s novel Klingsor (2014). This is done via new materialist philosophy and literary studies focusing on objects, a perspective through which Lindgren´s works have not yet been studied. The essay analyses several of the objects in the text, such as a particular glass, items in a kitchen, paintings, pesticides, etcetera, to understand if and how they break the norms of literary narrative and description. The result shows that the novel portrays objects in ways that bypass the normative ways of describing them; the objects influence the characters (as opposed to the other way around), they exhibit their own temporalities and they do not function merely as symbols or mirrors of human experience.

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This study constitutes the first critical history of dematerialization. Coined by critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in their 1968 essay, “The Dematerialization of Art,” this term was initially used to describe an emergent “ultra-conceptual” art that would render art objects obsolete by emphasizing the thinking process over material form. Lippard and Chandler believed dematerialization would thwart the commodification of art. Despite Lippard admitting in 1973 that art had not dematerialized into unmediated information or experience, the term has since entered art historians’ lexicons as a standard means to characterize Conceptual Art. While art historians have debated the implications of dematerialization and its actuality, they have yet to examine closely Lippard and Chandler’s foundational essay, which has been anthologized in truncated form. If dematerialization was not intrinsic to Conceptual Art, what was it? By closely analyzing “The Dematerialization of Art” and Lippard and Chandler’s other overlooked collaborative essays, this dissertation will shed light on the genealogy of dematerialization by contending they were not describing a trend limited to what is now considered Conceptual Art. By investigating the socio-historical connections of dematerialization, this dissertation will advance a more far-reaching view of the ideology of dematerialization, a cultural misrecognition that the world should be propelled toward immateriality that is located at the intersection of particle physics, environmental sustainability, science-fiction, neoliberal politics, and other discourses. This analysis then focuses on three case studies that examine singular works of art over a twenty-year period: Eva Hesse’s Laocoön (1966), James Turrell’s Skyspace I (1974), and Anish Kapoor’s 1000 Names (1979-85). In doing so, this dissertation will accomplish two objectives. First, it looks at how these works materially respond to the ideology of dematerialization and provide a means for charting how this cultural desire unfolds across space and time. Second, this dissertation contends that contrary to Lippard and Chandler’s prognostication, dematerialization—and immateriality—does not correlate to emancipation from capitalization. Rather, it will be shown that dematerialization, its rhetoric, and its strategies can actually be enlisted into the service of the commoditizing forces Lippard and Chandler hoped it would escape.