A/r/tography is a host of practice-based methods of inquiry attentive to contiguity and resonance, motion and materiality, possibility and potentiality (Irwin 2005; 2024). It articulates exchanges, configurations, and contagions through techniques such as notation (e.g. musical, choreographic, intermedial); measurement (e.g. iconic, numeric, spectral) or maps (e.g. aural, olfactory, tactile, visual).

As a force, process, capacity, sensorial quality, chemical property, and ability to do work, energy is all around us. Beyond the sun, wind, fire, tides and oceans, embodied and disembodied labour (human, animal or machinic), it can be found in materials such as crystals, glass, or steel; in viscous liquids such as honey or custard; in chemical elements such as helium or mercury; in objects such as springs and magnets; in processes such as compression, coagulation, or vibration; and in phenomena such as morphic resonance.

We are interested in how energetic shapes and formations, trajectories, transductions and mutations, can be mapped, measured and notated across ‘running’ and deep time, and across species: animals, plants and machines, past and present. 

To this end, we invited a/r/tographic participation from creative practitioners (artists, designers, architects and poets) and theorists (philosophers and critical scholars).