Cultural Geography I: Mediums

Abstract

This first of three cultural geographies progress reports explores the place of creative practices in the production, consumption and circulation of cultural geographies in recent years. In the midst of the expansion of geographers using creative research methods, or collaborating with practitioners, I consider the calls for critical accounts of these forms of making geographical knowledge. I argue that the idea of ‘medium’ has emerged as an important frame for such accountings. Discussion explores firstly, the importance of the ‘post-medium’ transdisciplinary field, and secondly, the persistence of medium in shaping relations between cultural geography and creative practices.

Creative geographies in the age of AI: Co‐creative spatiality and the emerging techno‐material relations between artists and artificial intelligence

“…For many artists, a special source of creativity includes the mediums or materials they work with (Lapworth, 2015; Miller, 2017; see also Hawkins, 2021), which in this case is creative AI. Many artists spoke about how technology and AI had been a starting point for their work and how it had inspired them.…”

“…For many artists, working with AI represented a more intense means or medium to achieve broader goals, making it ‘more than a tool’ (see also Mazzone & Elgammal, 2019). According to Hawkins (2021, p. 3), in cultural geography, the medium often refers to material‐embodied practices of making and creating that can have a wider methodological value. An example of this was when A21 spoke of how ‘these new perspectives offered by AI made me do totally different and various things … It has liberated my action in many directions, because it just feels like a powerful and miraculous medium’.…”

“…The topic is geographical, because, as we argue, new spatialities are formed when humans and AI create together. Creative geographers have already challenged the human‐centred approach to creativity and redirected their work to material relations, mediums and dispersed agencies (e.g., Hawkins, 2021; Lapworth, 2015; Pigott, 2020; Williams, 2016). However, techno‐material perspectives on creativity have been less investigated within creative geographies (except for: Nordström, 2017; Rose, 2016; Woodward et al, 2015; Zebracki & Luger, 2019).…”

Making space to write ‘care-fully’: Engaged responses to the institutional politics of research writing

“…In a similar vein, creative approaches to how geographic knowledge is expressed and referenced – how we ‘write-and-cite’ – have also been used to challenge what constitutes an ‘academic’ text (e.g. poetry, song and art), publication spaces, peer review processes and grant application assessments (Hawkins, 2021). Such interventions question what is ‘success’ and how it should be represented and evaluated in relation to our research writing (DeLyser and Hawkins, 2014; Madge, 2014; Mott and Cockayne, 2017; Thomson, 2018).…”

“…op-eds in newspapers) and digital (e.g. tweets, blog posts) forms of media, and other ‘creative’ texts (Hawkins, 2021).…”