Mutable Data: Artistic Apophatic Research
🗓️ Wednesday, 24 June — 3:10pm
- 4:30pm
(80 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
This workshop opens space for grappling with precarious, mutable forms of data by deepening the potential of artistic research through apophatic thought — the recognition that some realities exceed description and can only be approached through indirection, pointing, negation, and silence. Across three parts, participants engage existing artistic strategies such as absence, detour, and negation, connecting them with central insights of apophatic studies to evoke the unsayable, ineffable dimensions of experience that precede language.
Drawing from the Soft Data/Base project (Woodring 2025), the first part of our workshop engages participants in creative strategies for confabulating mutable visual data for illegible or otherwise data-avoidant experience. Pushing beyond passive notions of quantified selfhood endemic to platform capitalism, this segment focuses on the transformative potential of contextualizing certain forms of artistic practice as mutable data in a time of personal data leakage and extraction.
Subsequently, participants will be introduced to the field of ‘apophatic thought’. Apophatic thought has shaped artistic practices for centuries, yet contemporary artistic research rarely invokes apophatic thought as a lens. Thus, as a field, apophatic studies are generally unexplored by artistic researchers, even as they offer several powerful insights and approaches relevant to art practice and research. During the workshop, we will share central insights on the cross-over between apophatic studies and the arts, drawing on comparative literature (Franke, 2007; 2013), ecopoetics (Azambuja, 2025, 2023) and artistic research (Visse, 2024, 2025; Woodring, 2025).
In the final segment of the workshop, participants will critically examine the promises and pitfalls of apophatic studies within their own artistic research, and situating the field in dialogue with prominent new materialist frameworks — including those of Bolt, Barad, and Bennett.
Drawing from the Soft Data/Base project (Woodring 2025), the first part of our workshop engages participants in creative strategies for confabulating mutable visual data for illegible or otherwise data-avoidant experience. Pushing beyond passive notions of quantified selfhood endemic to platform capitalism, this segment focuses on the transformative potential of contextualizing certain forms of artistic practice as mutable data in a time of personal data leakage and extraction.
Subsequently, participants will be introduced to the field of ‘apophatic thought’. Apophatic thought has shaped artistic practices for centuries, yet contemporary artistic research rarely invokes apophatic thought as a lens. Thus, as a field, apophatic studies are generally unexplored by artistic researchers, even as they offer several powerful insights and approaches relevant to art practice and research. During the workshop, we will share central insights on the cross-over between apophatic studies and the arts, drawing on comparative literature (Franke, 2007; 2013), ecopoetics (Azambuja, 2025, 2023) and artistic research (Visse, 2024, 2025; Woodring, 2025).
In the final segment of the workshop, participants will critically examine the promises and pitfalls of apophatic studies within their own artistic research, and situating the field in dialogue with prominent new materialist frameworks — including those of Bolt, Barad, and Bennett.
Biography
Merel Visse (www.merelvisse.com) is a scholar, visual artist, editor, and educator whose interdisciplinary work is grounded in apophatic thought, artistic research, and political care ethics. She serves as faculty at Drew University, where she chairs a Graduate Program, and worked at the University of Humanistic Studies for over a decade. Merel is the co-editor of Visual Arts Research and co-founded the Meaningful Artistic Research Ph.D. Program in the Netherlands, and co-chairs the Art & Care Platform Series.
Ryan Woodring (ryanwoodring.com) is compelled by a bilateral relationship with invisibility wrought by chronic illness and a decade+ of visual effects experience making things disappear. Woodring (he/they) serves as Assistant Teaching Professor of Digital Media at Drew University. He has exhibited and spoken internationally in various contexts such as The Museum of the Moving Image, New York, Rochester Art Center, Minnesota, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts and elsewhere. He founded the Soft Data/Base curatorial project and is a member of Blockbusters New Media and Video Collective. Ryan is one of the initiators of the apophatic.art initiative.
Ryan Woodring (ryanwoodring.com) is compelled by a bilateral relationship with invisibility wrought by chronic illness and a decade+ of visual effects experience making things disappear. Woodring (he/they) serves as Assistant Teaching Professor of Digital Media at Drew University. He has exhibited and spoken internationally in various contexts such as The Museum of the Moving Image, New York, Rochester Art Center, Minnesota, Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts and elsewhere. He founded the Soft Data/Base curatorial project and is a member of Blockbusters New Media and Video Collective. Ryan is one of the initiators of the apophatic.art initiative.