Enactive research : transversal possibilities for expanding the imaging of science

This paper explores the notion of the expanded image as a transdisciplinary interaction between people and environments. In support of this proposition, images and imaging will be discussed through a series of transformative steps: from the diagram to the biogram and from the biogram to biotopology. Two research projects, exemplary of a transdisciplinary approach, inform the move to biotopology (the continuous surface of interactions tied to imaging practices): first, theories of enaction in cognitive science foreground co-selective processes and the precariousness of self- organizing systems and supply new ways of imaging body-environment relationships (Stewart et al 2010; Thompson 2007; and Varela et al 1993); and second, the procedural architecture of artist- turned-architects Arakawa and Gins foregrounds the reconfigurability of the co-selective process that becomes an enactive practice. These approaches suggest that if the image were expanded to include the intersection of the human organism’s behaviors, artifacts (such as images) and built- environments, then the ‘person’ whose myriad surfaces flicker towards future action, might become the best description of an expanded form of imaging, always in process and flickering towards future action. The many and non-locatable surfaces of person would defy disciplinary boundaries and interfere with habitual patterns of imaging. Ultimately, the aim of expanding imaging practices is to expand an embodied capacity to configure and reconfigure conceptual and material realms.