The Alchemy of Research-Creation: On Pataphysical Experimentation, Dark Infrastructures, and Antifascist Studio Practices

Research-creation is an attempt to suspend the operative divisions that define Western modernity—divisions between the head and the hand, knowledge and pleasure, science and art. Yet this practice, which has so much promise, has often fallen prey to facile, fashionable notions of interdisciplinarity and hybridizations of science and art. The Alchemy of Research-Creation charts a new, imaginative genealogy for research-creation by returning to a spatial and temporal configuration that predates the advent of the divided Western world: the alchemical studio. Shifting focus to the alchemical studio means fundamentally reconceptualizing the problematic of research-creation, aligning it with queer, pataphysical, and neurodiverse forms of non-knowledge rather than more familiar, safe epistemological questions about scientific validity and aesthetic judgment. Through engagements with pataphysical artists, critical theorists, and occult practitioners, Tyson E. Lewis and Peter B. Hyland open up a dark dimension within research-creation that has the potential to set adrift what can be thought and sensed beyond the current coordinates of our divided world.