New Criticals

The emphasis on participation as the core of many projects and artworks requires material examination that includes the social but is not limited to it. In other words the questions of participation should include considerations of what is produced in the process beyond the community and the social, that is what material and discursive results are created by participatory practices and artworks. Such an attitude necessarily has to include two phenomena that are regularly underplayed in considerations of participatory practices which are essential for aesthetic experience to occur. I argue that there is a need to recognise other than human participants in the production of participatory works, as well as other and new forms of collective subjectivities that cannot be simply described as community.  The inclusion of these two phenomena has to take into account their location and connection to systems and processes beyond the work itself as they are part of wider terrain that is common to everyday experiences and their workings within complex and networked environments.