This paper develops a vitalist conception of habit as a means to theorize the material capacity of art-encounters to reconfigure and reinvent the subject. Drawing principally on the innovative conceptualization of habit articulated in the philosophies of Félix Ravaisson and Gilles Deleuze, where it is theorized as a much more volatile and creative force of repetition that makes change possible, I first explore how habit pushes our contemporary understandings of the subject through an attentiveness to its ontogenetic emergence from material and affective processes and ecologies, as well as its plastic susceptibility to immanent disruption. Second, and through an engagement with the bioaesthetic and micropolitical thought of Deleuze and Guattari, I argue that it is precisely on the ontogenetic terrain of plastic habits that art-encounters might be understood to intervene. I unpack this empirically through an engagement with the bioartistic practices of the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A), whose 'semi-living' installation art, I argue, stages a disruption of pernicious contemporary habits in favour of new and creative capacities for thinking, perceiving, and relating to the nonhuman.

In recent years "bioart" has been lauded in the social sciences for its creative engagements with the ontological stakes of new forms of biotechnical life in-the-making. In this paper I push further to explore the ontogenetic potentials of bioart-encounters to generate new capacities for thinking and perceiving the nonhuman agencies imbricated in the becoming of subjects. To explore this potential I stage an encounter with Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation, highlighting three implications for theorisations of the constitution and transformation of subjects. First, Simondon forces us to rethink the subject in terms of its transductive emergence from preindividual processes, and its metastable susceptibility to ongoing transformations. Second, he substitutes voluntarist conceptions of thought with an involuntarist primacy of material encounters as the conditions for novel individuations. Finally, I argue that Simondon enables a thinking of the politics of the (bio)art-encounter in terms of its ontogenetic capacity to materially produce, rather than merely represent, new subjects and worlds.

Post-humanist theories shaping contemporary geographic research have unsettled the privileged position of the "human" as a common reference to apprehend social life. This decentring of the human demands that we rethink our expectations of, and approaches to, methodological practice and the traditional distinctions made between the theoretical and the empirical. In this introduction and the following interventions, we explore how a material situatedness and attention to nonhuman agencies within post-humanist thought complement and extend existing methodological innovations within human geography. We do so with reference to a series of Masters workshopsa somewhat overlooked space of research-creationeach of which explored the implications of post-humanism on methodological practice. The introduction concludes with three key tenets that were followed in each of the individual workshops, and which set out an ethos for practising post-humanism more broadly. K E Y W O R D S experimentation, geographic method, Masters workshops, nonhuman intensities, post-humanist theory, theory/practice divide 1 | PRACTISING POST-HUMANISM: WHY NOW?Recently, there has been a push to explore more experimental orientations to the "doing" of research and to develop practices that problematise methodological assumptions pertaining to rigour, reliability, and representation within geography (Dowling et al., 2016(Dowling et al., , 2017(Dowling et al., , 2018Vannini, 2015;Whatmore, 2006). In this paper we contribute to these exciting debates by engaging with the way post-humanist theoretical innovations shaping contemporary human geography require us to rethink the empirical demands and methodological responsibilities of geographical research. In bringing the material and affective registers of social life to the fore, post-humanist theories have the potential to reconfigure our relation to research practices in ways that trouble the traditional distinction between the theoretical and the empirical. It is in this potential for capturing novel aspects of contemporary social and cultural life, in excess of human durations, that we situate our concern for the practice of post-humanism within human geography.Responding to the call to experiment methodologically, the turn to more-than-human geographies has done much to broaden the remit of contemporary research to include the agency of the nonhuman in shaping social life. As Bastian et al. (2016, p. 2) note, a key concern here is "to take nonhuman life, and the entanglements of human/nonhuman life seriously" in the production of geographical knowledge. This concern is precisely about the challenge of attending to diverse nonhuman agencies in ways that demand different approaches to the act of doing geographical research. In turning to the relationship between post-humanism and geographical research (Braun,

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the field of ‘art-science’ collaborations for their perceived capacity to develop new cultural understandings of technology and science. In this article, and through an engagement with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, I argue that if art-science represents an important site for the formation of an alternate technical culture today, then it is because of the new technical mentalities that such practices might cultivate. Here, creating a new technical mentality is more than just a representational concern with enhancing ‘public awareness’ of technology, instead referring to more material transformations in our embodied capacities for perceiving and affectively engaging with technologies. I flesh this potential out through an encounter with work of Art Orienté objet, whose art-science collaborations challenge the anthropocentric and utilitarian mentalities of contemporary bioscience through explorations of the transindividual conditions of human embodiment and its material immersion within nonhuman ecologies.