Discourses of intervention: a language for arts collaboration

This article explores how two different kinds of subjects, an architect-cum-digital media artist and an engineer, tease out and negotiate ideas from alien contexts. Brought together by a desire to explore the cybridity of physicality through artistic expressions, we recognise the need for a new language and ways of speaking that open potentials for the creation of new realities. Postcolonial discourse and the concept of vertical and horizontal discourses theorised by educational sociologist Basil Bernstein will provide the lenses by which we describe our collaboration, which is partially performed herein through language. We propose to describe our discourse of intervention as discourses in which each dialogue is a deliberative “language game” played out through the metonymy of ideas in our fields (e.g., belonging and fuzzy membership functions) to produce a subject always different to itself. By interjecting interventions between and among our respective territories of knowledge, we hope to create a new mode of practice that is neither trapped by our territories nor a duplex copy of them, but rather multidimensional transmissions reinterpreting our meaning structures.