Affect (Cultural Theory)

"Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos opens the book with his latest contribution to his comprehensive project of re-theorising spatial justice with a piece titled ‘Spatial Justice in a World of Violence’. Through a close reading
of the photographic series Fortunes of War, Life Day by artist Eric Lesdema,
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is interested in how these images reveal peripheral
spaces at the edge of violence which impose an ethic of spatial responsibility on the
viewer in the act of turning away and looking elsewhere. While no acts of explicit
violence are shown in the images, we are left with no doubt that violence is ubiquitous
along the spatio-temporal continuum. This continuum of violence between
bodies raises questions of complicity and responsibility. Do we submit to a state
of affairs in which space is saturated with the everyday and immobilised violence
of the ‘engineered atmosphere’ – or is it also possible for bodies to withdraw from
the atmosphere, through ruptures and folds within the continuum? Such a notion
raises the ethical possibility of the ‘emergence of spatial justice’." Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir (eds)

This article addresses the recent attempts to integrate evolutionary history in the US national narrative. Focusing on the cultural, legal, and scientific controversy over Kennewick Man, the ancient human remains discovered in Washington state in 1996, the article explores the narrative politics of American national belonging. Through a popular historical novel on Kennewick Man's life, the article further theorizes nostalgia as a narrative tool in imagining the evolutionary origins of the nation. The article argues that nostalgia produces a temporal dynamic that bridges the gap between national history and global prehistory, and that this dynamic is reinforced through cultural ideas of genetic knowledge. At the same time, prehistoric nostalgia renders problematic ideas of ethnic difference largely invisible.

From sites like Hollaback! and Everyday Sexism, which document instances of street harassment and misogyny, to social media-organized movements and communities like #MeToo and #BeenRapedNeverReported, feminists are using participatory digital media as actvist tools to speak, network, and organize against sexism, misogyny, and rape culture. As the first book-length study to examine how girls, women, and some men negotiate rape culture through the use of digital platforms, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and mobile apps, the authors explore four primary questions: What experiences of harassment, misogyny, and rape culture are being responded to? How are participants using digital media technologies to document experiences of sexual violence, harassment, and sexism? Why are girls, women and some men choosing to mobilize digital media technologies in this way? And  finally, what are the various experiences of using digital technologies to engage in activism? In order to capture these diverse experiences of doing digital feminist activism, the authors augment their analysis of this media (blog posts, tweets, and selfies) with in-depth interviews and close- observations of several online communities that operate globally.

This is the entire book.

"Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?" is an attempt to understand why scholars have begun writing at such tremendous length on individual pictures. Before the 20th c., one of the longest texts on a single painting was Vasari's description of Leonardo's "Last Supper." In the last forty years it has become common for historians to write entire books on individual artworks.

Why have we started experiencing images as so complex? Why do they seem to us like puzzles, waiting to be solved? Why doesn't it concern us that previous generations did not think of writing at such length?

This book also has a couple of chapters on what I consider to be psychotic behavior about images: compulsive sighting of supposedly hidden images, and a crazy art historical book about a painting written by Dalí. So I have tagged the book with psychoanalytic terms.

The book itself is still in print and in copyright, but I found a full pdf of this on the internet (for example on scribd), so I decided to post it on here on academia.edu, where at least it can have the correct context and links.

[Karen ann Donnachie, PhD // Doctoral Thesis: Full-text]
This multidisciplinary, practice explores the phenomenon of the selfie (understood as a networked, vernacular, photographic selfportrait) in order to propose a new critical understanding of its effect on wider photographic self-portrait practice, and photography in general.

Significantly, “The Human Use of the Human Face” depicts the selfie as more than a mere vernacular object or action and is not satisfied with the dismissal of the selfie as a direct remediation of the traditional self-portrait. Instead this thesis maps the complex, and sometimes controversial genre of amateur self-portraiture as it sits somewhere between performance, narcissism, social tic, intrinsic desire for self-projection and a possibly irrational quest for authenticity in the photographic image.

This practice-led research is articulated through the creation of original digital and electronic artworks including speculative camera design, social media web apps and immersive installation; through interviews with contemporary artists; and finally through the discussion of cultural, aesthetic and photographic theory. This research examines the privileged position the selfie holds inside a rapidly expanding and evolving social media ecology as it becomes both vehicle and tool, a symbol of personal, social, cultural and political identities. Along with the prevailing concerns surrounding the selfie and its reflection on contemporary society, this thesis inserts notions of human affect, connectedness, belonging and being human into the discussion concerning the motivations behind, and social consequences of, the selfie in three areas: first life, second life, and afterlife.

This thesis was presented in 2016 for my PhD (Art), awarded from the School of Design & Art, Curtin University, Western Australia, 2017.

This dissertation presents a mathematically informed, cultural-materialist interpretation of a classically romantic literary-theoretic thesis: that a work of literature can aesthetically communicate an ineffably complex holistic understanding of the real world, which we might call the work's `aesthetic meaning.' Drawing on a generalization of `deep learning' ("artificial intuition") systems and on elementary algorithmic information theory, we describe a kind or aspect of aesthetic meaning—`ambient meaning'—that may have a special resonance with Modernist and avant-garde approaches to aesthetic meaning, as well as with the concepts of aesthetically sophisticated cultural-materialist literary theory of the kind that critics like Sianne Ngai or Raymond Williams practice, sometimes understood as 'affect studies.'

New understandings have developed recently in the analysis of class, emerging from
understandings of culture and affect. These understandings expand the ways we
recognize and make sense of class relations; they ask: what does the concept of class
“do” and how does it do what it does? These are dynamic and performative under-
standings of class in the making that range in scale from the global to the intimate.
They ask: how has the term class come into effect, by and for whom, and to whom
does it apply? What purpose and interests does classification serve? And what sig-
nificance does it hold for our understandings of social relations more generally?

How often do we consider ourselves not in our right minds because of our anger, opt to cool off rather than continue a debate. Anger as emotion is understood and used in ways that weaken arguments. In this essay I will explore how a nuanced understanding of anger, and specifically a reframing of anger as an affect rather than an emotion, allows for anger to be a valid and perhaps even essential aspect of protest. I will specify what affect is considered to be in comparison to emotion and provide examples of the ways in which anger as emotion is used by examining the gendered and racial biases that portray young men and women of colour as ‘thugs’ and ‘angry black women’.

Since the kick-off in 2015 of the last presidential campaign, a climate of fear and intimidation has dominated national life in the United States to a degree rarely seen before, poisoning our politics and reaching into our very relationships with friends, co-workers, and neighbors.
    Confronting Political Intimidation is about how this came to be, how we can see ourselves through it, but also why it is not likely to go away anytime soon.
      At the core of this political history is a larger U.S. public culture of intimidation and bullying in the workplace, media, and political arena that has been building for 30 years. It is not by chance that in 2017 the U.S. inaugurated Donald Trump, an openly authoritarian president who is an abusive CEO, capitalist folk hero, and Internet troll.
    The current harsh environment is a direct challenge to citizens and residents, especially those seeking to engage in progressive activism and party politics now and in the years to come.
      This short book offers a unique guide to the strategies and dynamics of contemporary political intimidation and public bullying: the dangers they present, the snares and traps that envelop their targets, and the lessons to be learned.
      In the end, it’s about shedding light on the dark side of contemporary national life in order to see beyond it.

Net sales proceeds will go to Indviisible National of IndivisbleGuide,com.

In France, the justice system for minors, since the government edict of 2nd February 1945, has been distinguished officially from others by the importance attached to applying an " educative " rather than " repressive " approach. This explicit stance on the part of the political and judicial authorities is reflected in the development of institutions whose policy is one of " educational " supervision. But what does this educational work consist of? In a context marked by the increasing bureaucratization of socio-judicial work, how do officials assess the impact and effectiveness of the policy? Using the results of an ethnography conducted in an open custody unit of the Youth Judicial Protection Service (Protection Judi-ciaire de la Jeunesse) and a children's court in the Paris region, this study shows that professionals attach particular importance to bringing about a change in attitude towards self and others. The understanding is that " successful support " of delinquent minors will encourage them to express a sense of responsibility and guilt for their behaviour, two feelings invested with redemptive, healing abilities. Expression of such sentiments, which are at the heart of the moral economy of juvenile delinquency, is understood to attest to a subjective transformation , which becomes the ultimate justification for the work done with these delinquents as well as a condition for their pardon. The importance attached to eliciting expressions of a sense of responsibility and guilt thus contributes to disciplining sentiments, where the aim is no longer to correct behaviour but persons.

This paper explores the "contractions" of meteorological and mental disturbances in Jenny Offill's novella "Weather." It is particularly interested in the ways in which the novella uses formal strategies to create the affective experience of uncertainty and, possibly, eco-anxiety.

Wir sind User. Früher waren manche von uns noch Surfer. Es gab den Einstieg und ein Ende dieser Aktivität. Vor allem aber handelte es sich dabei um eine Aktivität. Es ging mitunter darum, ein neues Gebiet zu entdecken, sich anonym zu begegnen, Pornos zu schauen, Wissen, Erfahrung, Bilder einzuholen und zu teilen. Es gab eine Zeit - und diese tickte in Minuten -, da wurde das Internet als Ort der Freiheit und demokratischen Gleichheit gefeiert, an dem Teilhabe theoretisch allein durch den Anschluss (den Computer, das Telefon, das Modem) gewährleistet war. Das Surfer-Subjekt schien darin befreit von den Normen und Normalisie-rungen, den Einschließungen und Repressionen des Alltags. Die Hoffnung war,

This essay looks to the work of iconic rap artist Tupac Shakur to illuminate the role of Black rage as a common denominator between rap’s most conscious and gangsta iterations. Specifically, by theorizing Black rage as the founding affective impulse of the hip-hop nation, critics can identify common affective threads across the genre and spy emancipatory potential in hip-hop’s most jarring excesses, as surely as its more lucidly political iterations. I argue that theorizing Black rage through the lens of affect avoids many of the essentialist entanglements associated with earlier scholarship on the concept. The essay also challenges communication scholars to emphasize the emancipatory potential that underlies affective investments through the sociohistorical contextualization thereof.

In our article, we investigate the affective economy of national-populist image circulation on Facebook. This is highly relevant, since social media has been an essential area for the spread of national-populist ideology. In our research, we analyse image circulation as affective practice, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. We use computational data analysis methods to examine visual big data: image fingerprints and reverse image search engines to track down the routes of thousands of circulated images as well as make discourse-historical analysis on the images that have gained most attention among supporters. Our research demonstrates that these existing tools allow social science research to make theory-solid approaches to understand the role of image circulation in creating and sustaining national and transnational networks on social media, and show how national-populist thinking is spread through images that catalyse and mobilise affects – fear, anger and resentment – thus creating an effective affective economy.

Like Arena, the sociology of social movements is fifty years old. As in social movement theory, the nature, structure, contexts, theoretical conflicts and consequences of social movement activity have been debated continuously in and by Arena. It would be difficult to do justice to the scope and intensity of Arena's intellectual engagement with social movements and the questions provoked by both new and old forms of collective action. Any investigation, by definition, would be partial and highly selective. One could choose the nuclear-disarmament movement, the feminist movement, Indigenous activism, the politics of the green movement or any example of the various nationalist struggles with social movement aims - such as those in East Timor, West Papua and New Caledonia - that Arena has covered or uncovered, often having been at the forefront of debate over the last decades. This essay moves in a slightly different direction. In order to examine key aspects of Arena's impact on our understanding of social movements, my comments will span contributions from the May 1968 events in Paris to the Occupy movement from 2011 on. Given the themes of beginnings and endings running through the publication over the last half a century ('the end of students', 'the end of social movements', 'goodbye to the sixties'), this seems like an apt way forward. My aims are threefold: first, to trace some interpretive shifts in Arena in relation to the emergence of 'the student' as a new revolutionary subject; second, to try to capture something very distinctive about Arena's publications - first 'Arena', the 'Arena Journal and Arena Magazine' - namely their blend of a transnational and an idiosyncratically Australian focus; and, third, to tentatively suggest that, like social movements themselves, Arena produces activist subjects through the processes of writing, interpretation, reading and related forms of cultural radicalism.

Front matter and Preface to Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages. This preface explore relations between touching and affective piety and the relation between affect as a cultural force and the senses. Juxtaposing the artwork of Gonzalez Torres to the definitions and applications of affective piety, frames the content of the edited volume.

Abstract: This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.
Keywords: Atlantic Return, economies of virtues, incarnation, Pauline event, Pope Francis, sovereignty, theopolitics, touch-event

This paper moves beyond conceptualisations of austerity as fiscal policy towards exploring the multiple ways austerity may be lived and felt in everyday life. Drawing on research with families affected by disability, this paper argues that austerity is felt as a series of atmospheres that envelop and condition times and spaces of the everyday. Austerity is made both affectively and materially present through these atmospheric intensities as they register and radiate between individual bodies and everyday objects. As they shape both day-today practices and future imaginaries, atmospheres of austerity generate numerous individualised experiences that result in multiple affective relations towards austerity. As a result, this paper holds together the following relations to austerity: anticipating austerity, adapting to austerity, 'getting on with life' and accepting austerity. These show that austerity is more than an economic policy; it is a phenomenon that is understood through individuals' lived and felt realities that are often experienced through fluctuating, non-coherent and sometimes conflicting affective relations that come to shape how people feel and act in the everyday. It is through a conceptualisation of austerity as lived that we might galvanise people against austerity by encouraging a more nuanced and multi-tonal counter politics that takes into account the multiple affective relations that are expressed through various domains of everyday life.

The article investigates the ways in which Pirjo Honkasalo's documentary The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (2004), examining the impact of the Russian-Chechen war on children, engenders a transnational audience through cinematic qualities, and most importantly through embodiment, producing a strongly affective resonance in the spectator. I argue that through a strategically affective approach to transnationality, the documentary establishes what I call a transnational shared space, shaped by a complex dialectics of sharing and non-sharing. My argument revolves around the concept of cinema as a shared space, referring to films that deliberately 'surround' the viewer rather than maintain a distance. As the analysis shows, Honkasalo's documentary pushes the spectator to reflect critically on transnationality and reconsider mass media-created memory of the military conflict. The article addresses issues underlying the film's ethical quest, such as whether this shared space involves both western (Catholic) and non-western (Orthodox and Muslim) audiences, and what the limits are of transnationalism in documentary film.

What happens when media technologies are able to interpret our feelings, emotions, moods, and intentions? In this cutting edge new book, Andrew McStay explores that very question and argues that these abilities result in a form of technological empathy. Offering a balanced and incisive overview of the issues raised by ‘Emotional AI’, this book:

- Provides a clear account of the social benefits and drawbacks of new media trends and technologies such as emoji, wearables and chatbots.

- Demonstrates through empirical research how ‘empathic media’ have been developed and introduced both by start-ups and global tech corporations such as Facebook.

- Helps readers understand the potential implications on everyday life and social relations through examples such as video-gaming, facial coding, virtual reality and cities.

- Calls for a more critical approach to the rollout of emotional AI in public and private spheres.

Combining established theory with original analysis, this book will change the way students view, use and interact with new technologies. It should be required reading for students and researchers in media, communications, the social sciences and beyond.

Winner of F. E. L. Priestley Prize for best essay published in 2017 English Studies in Canada:
"Dr Jagoe’s article stands out for its originality, its generative capacity, its critical acumen, and its accessible style. Dr Jagoe compares and critiques two popular articulations of today’s digitally immersed Zeitgeist—Sherry Turkle’s 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other and Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her—in order to propose “an ethics of depersonalized intimacy.” Against the grain of capitalism’s production of an agentic, authentic, and coherent self, Jagoe argues for “a different form of relationality” that challenges how we imagine intimacy and how both humanism and neoliberalism demand selves to be produced. Turkle’s writing and Jonze’s film illustrate Jagoe’s argument in that their representations of human-machine couplings broach the premise of depersonalized intimacy—but fail to push those premises and instead fall back on moralistic and clichéd tropes of and arguments for genuine selfhood and human communication. In the process, their humanist recuperations of organic-machinic interaction “hamper more emancipatory projects of intimacy, community, political action, and social change” that, in contrast, Jagoe’s theory of depersonalized intimacy opens up."

Aya is anxiously waiting for a future in which humans coexist with robots. She didn't think this was possible in her lifetime, but when she learned about LOVOT, a 43 cm-tall furry robot on wheels designed specifically to seek out and offer affection, she was elated to discover that the future she had imagined was within reach. She urged me to take hold of it-LOVOT, that is. We were chatting at a recent Talk Session for LOVOT fans and a few of the creatures were spinning around a table as we talked. Its wheels folded into its body, and with animated LED eyes it looked up at me and blinked. I picked it up and Aya poked its nose, eliciting something like an irritated giggle from the robot, whose name I learned was Cherry. Aya stroked Cherry's belly and its eyes blinked a few times and then slowly closed. "It fell asleep! How cute (kawaii)!" Aya exclaimed. Although Aya claimed to be uninterested in robots, technology, or anything in the IT world in general, she was immediately and, as she describes, inexplicably moved by LOVOT. It's just an emotion (kanjō), she reflected. "You know about lonely people (kodoku na hito) in Japan, right?" Aya asked. "I think that everyone needs to feel affection (aichaku), and everyone enjoys this feeling we can get from cute things. It fulfills your heart (kokoro o mitasu). But not everyone can get this feeling… I think that in the future maybe one or two people out of ten might simply have relationships with things like LOVOT. It's not really any different from the kind of affection one gets from a dog or cat, or even another person. And it's their choice! This is a really interesting future!" My chance encounter with a LOVOT fan I call Aya made me think about the future of intimacy, and how both the imagination of that future and the forms of affect that excite it were already being mediated by the emergence of new robotic creatures in Japan equipped with artificial emotional intelligence. Most of all, I was curious about how companies like Groove X, the creator of LOVOT, were reimagining technology's contributions to new forms of emotional health and wellbeing beyond traditional arrangements of interhuman relationships. With the arrival of other mechanical companions such Cast against the backdrop of what mass media have labeled the "healing boom" (iyashi būmu) in Japan, in which a variety of services emerged in the 1990s to address growing rates of stress, anxiety, and loneliness tied to increasingly strenuous and precarious labor conditions (Allison 2013), these robots are created to provide companionship rather than convenience.

During the Government of the “Citizen Revolution,” innovative spaces of relationship between the State and civil society crossed by the affective were introduced to Ecuadorian politics. The affective atmospheres configured in these political spaces created particular senses and practices of citizenship that, as I propose, transformed both the ways in which the State and civil society relate as well as the practices of collective action and political participation in Ecuador. In this article I explore how the affective atmospheres built in these political spaces, configured by the Government of Rafael Correa, differently affected the citizenship senses and practices of women and men; and in turn, how the discourses and practices crossed by gender transformed these affective atmospheres.

Książka ukazuje, jak zmieniały się przedstawienia związków miłosnych człowieka i maszyny w filmach science fiction, pochodzących z amerykańskiego i zachodnioeuropejskiego kręgu kulturowego, i jakie przekazy kulturowe na temat podmiotowości współczesnego człowieka i innych podmiotów otaczającej go rzeczywistości wpisane są w historie miłosne opowiedziane w analizowanych filmach. W interpretacji autorki omawiane filmy stawiają pytania o to, czy maszyny obdarzone sztuczną inteligencją mogłyby wchodzić w miłosne interakcje z człowiekiem i co miałoby to oznaczać dla obu stron w kontekście ich podmiotowości.

This paper maps the intersection of affect theory with literature and art through the revision of the question of representation. I argue that affect theory reinvigor-ates the problematic of representation by turning it into a debate about mediation, producing two main critical gestures when in contact with literary and artworks. On the one hand, scholarship has stayed "between representation" by taking affect as excessive of cognitive processes in order to analyze and expand how affect influences our representations of these processes, both when doing literary and art criticism, and when elaborating epistemological paradigms. On the other, theory has also stepped "beyond representation" by looking at affect as an autonomous entity in mediation whose capacities affect and surpass human cognition. In treating affect as a new capacious entity, critical concerns revolve around ontological questions, and they prioritize what affect is and does to bodies more than what it means.

Pardis Mahdavi’s Crossing the Gulf is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Arabian Gulf that investigated immobilities and mobilities as well as familial love in the lives of migrant workers. Although her data concentrate mainly on Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), her arguments are relevant to other countries in the area with a signifi- cant presence of domestic workers. The book offers a deeply original reading of migration and intimacy.

Whilst the concept of the subject has been called into question by many diverse approaches within contemporary political and social theory, there remains a focus upon agency, now attributable to reformulated subjectivities or assemblages. I query the persistence of this grammar of agency and ask whether politics can do without a ‘scene of the subject’. Spinoza’s philosophy, in particular his conception of conatus, has inspired and offered some basis for rethinking agency. I examine two such prominent positions (Judith Butler and Jane Bennett) and argue that ultimately neither captures the political promise of Spinoza’s philosophy. Configuring a concept of morphology to analyse this scene, my argument detaches the conatus from a narrow focus upon human desire, and focuses attention upon the scene of the subject as folded into a wider complex body. My approach also returns a study of power to the discussion: the conatus is the power to persist but it is also a differential force and site of conflict. By placing the spotlight on the scene of subjectivity in this way, the contemporary political theorist avoids the false antinomy between agency and structure, whilst continuing to track the production and composition of subjectivity in new political forms.

In this article I argue that the epiphanies in J.M. Coetzee’s fiction can be read
as literary enactments of the ‘creature-feeling’, a feeling of absolute dependence
on one’s creatureliness that was first described by the theologian Rudolf Otto. I
begin with a discussion of the creature-feeling with reference to William James’
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) andRudolfOtto’s The Idea of the Holy
(1917). Critics have observed that Coetzee’s fictions suggest shared embodiment
as the basis for humans’ ethical responsibility towards other humans and
towards animals, and have focussed on Emmanuel Le´vinas when addressing
theological influences on Coetzee’s non-rational ethics. Bringing James and
Otto into the discussion allows me to account for those epiphanic moments
in Coetzee that do not overlap with the ethical or the aesthetic, moments in
which characters experience what I call secular grace. Coetzee is not the first to
enact the creature-feeling: he reworks earlier enactments by James Joyce.

The Barkley Marathons is an infamously brutal endurance trail race, having only been completed by 15 runners in its 30-year history. It takes place in the rugged Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee, is approximately 130 miles long, and must be completed in under 60 hours. Its rules follow a unique set of constraints specific to the contours of the local topology, to the history of incarceration in the area, and to the idiosyncratic aesthetics and ethics of the race's two founders.

Considered as a form of constraint-based endurance performance art (which it is admittedly not), the Barkley Marathons suggest a "found" approach to performance constraints: an approach that puts performance in a more direct and fine-grained relationship with the details (geological, topological, meteorological, botanical, human-historical, non-human-historical) of the world in which (and with which) the performance occurs. The race opens out onto the mountains at multiple scales, multiple speeds, and along multiple vectors; and in turn, these particular mountains are allowed to have their own specific, non-generic influence on the form and style of the event.

The north-american mathematician and computer scientist Warren Weaver was one of the first enthusiasts of the machine translation technologies. On a memorandum written in 1949 he compared the experience of translation with the meeting of individuals, who were first closed in their own towers, on a common ground. Weaver imagined that it should be in this "great open basement, common to all" (1949, p. 11), where communication with those who have also descended from their towers should be easy. The author used the figure of the common ground to theorize on the possibility of a universal language that could be used in machine translation processes.
However, this is not the reason why we have found interest on the analogy described by Weaver. Instead, we have revisited it to establish a dialog between the possibility of meeting on a common ground and the connotations of normality and engagement which, according to Indian literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, are essential for any encounter and exchange between different-status individuals to happen (Spivak, 1995, p. xxv). By doing this, we put emphasis on acts of care and affection which may ensure a closer and long-term approach between non-identicals while transgressing the norms of political correctness. At this point, we defent the potential of the artistic practices to generate a participatory context where normality, affection and engagement are the main characteristics of that common ground where encounters may be possible. In this order of things, the artist is seen as the one who can work on the tasks of building the scenario and caring for all the agents that are supposed to meet on it.