running into each other: run! run! run! a festival and a collaboration

Abstract

artists and geographers frequently work together. the following essay explores one such on-going collaboration. centering on a festival organized by an artist and a geographer, it explores the productive antagonisms that working through and along disciplinary borders produces. keywords art, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, performance, productive antagonism, running I this is a story about an artist and a geographer. the artist makes films, installations, performances. her work was shown around the world: japan, australia, germany, finland, america, russia and england. critics praised her for her 'sardonic humor' and her 'sharp intelligence'. 1 she'd been named one of singapore's most exciting young artists. 'a media artist to look out for'. 2 but for all that success and all that attention, she was kind of tired of the world of art, its seriousness, its self-importance, its pretension, its pomposity that it couldn't take a joke. or that it could only take a joke if it was a serious joke. a weighty nudge nudge wink wink super clever self-referential, you probably don't get this kind of joke. the geographer didn't want to be an artist. and really, he wasn't all that interested in art. he was happy enough being what he was: a geographer. sure when he'd been younger, he'd tried other things. he briefly called himself an urbanist, flirted with sociology, worried that perhaps the world needed more art. that was a long time ago. now he owned a collection of jumpers, 3 sometimes wore merrell's, was thinking about a beard and now and again produced a more or less readable research paper. of course no-one read them, but that wasn't the point. the

An exploration of running as metaphor, methodology, material through the RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale #r3fest 2016

“…Following in the footsteps of the inaugural #r3fest, the 2016 run aimed to create a place where the usual norms of disciplinary practice were temporarily suspended, where creative collisions and 'productive antagonisms' occur (Latham and Tan 2016). This collage-like approach of mixing disparate disciplines together to engineer exchanges is itself informed by the exuberance of running (Tan 2014a).…”

“…These questions led me to the philosophy of 'poetic thinking' which prizes associations, metaphoric correlations, divergence and '10,000 things' over logic, causality and singularity (Hall and Ames 1995;Miller 2003;Graham 1986), which became one of the building blocks of 'productive antagonisms' that Latham and I came up with (Latham and Tan 2016). We wanted a playful, 'ill-disciplined' interdisciplinary approach to counter the negative, tribal or self-serious tendencies of the art and academic worlds -and #r3fest was prodictive antagonisms in action.…”

Geographies of running cultures and practices

“…Not only are there strong connections between the fields but the lack of pre‐existing conversations in geography prior to the mid‐2010s meant that current running geographies looked to other disciplines for inspiration and dialogue. As such, this article primarily focuses on geography's contribution to the running literature by reviewing English‐language work (a personal limitation, rather than a limitation of the field—see Madoré & Loret, 2021 for an example beyond the lingua franca ) published by geographers or in geographical outlets around the world whilst also drawing productive connections to other fields (as are commonly found in transdisciplinary running studies—Latham & Tan, 2017). While this is a discursive review, we have systematically searched a list of 90 geography journals, as well as on Google Scholar, for papers about ‘jogging’ and ‘running’.…”