International Forum on Artistic Research
17th Conference of the Society for Artistic Research (SAR)
Submission Number: 282
Submission ID: 345
Submission UUID: 8ef885bd-d2e1-477a-90f7-b37b035e311d

Created: Sun, 1 Mar 2026 - 00:46
Completed: Sun, 1 Mar 2026 - 01:23
Changed: Wed, 13 May 2026 - 08:16

Remote IP address: 74.68.138.75
Submitted by: Ryan Woodring
Language: English

Is draft: No
Current page: webform_confirmation

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Given name Ryan
Surname Woodring
Email rwoodring@drew.edu
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Title Mutable Data: Artistic Apophatic Research
Format Workshop
Main language English
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.
Image mutable_data_visse_woodring.png
Short biographies of the presenter(s)
  • 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.
Previous presentations or iterations of the research We haven’t delivered previous versions of this contribution.
Additional information Proposed schedule:

Artistic provocation (30 minutes
Apophatic studies (30 minutes)
Reflection (30 minutes)
Spatial and technical requirements Internet
Projector
Laptops, tablets or phones for visualization exercises
Seating
Tabletops
Potential risks or ethical concerns We do not foresee any at this time.
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