Glossary
Alt Prepping
Prepping usually means stockpiling supplies for a crisis. Alt Prepping keeps different reserves: skills, habits, ways of moving, ways of being with others, and small forms of mutual support. It nods to Octavia Butler’s Parable books, but it can sit anywhere between hope and dread.
Biological / Somatic Citizenship
Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas use “biological citizenship” for the way rights, duties, and identity get tied to biology and health. Rose also writes about “somatic” life: how people relate to themselves as bodies to be managed, protected, optimised, or treated. I keep the term “Somatic Citizenship”, but I also want room for non-medical accounts of the body, including artistic and lived ones.
Care
Joan Tronto (with Berenice Fisher) defines care broadly as what we do to maintain, continue, and repair our shared world so we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes bodies, selves, and environments. I like the breadth because it lets you zoom in to specific caring acts without losing the larger picture.
Care Ethics
Care ethics grew in the 1980s through writers like Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Eva Kittay, Joan Tronto, and Virginia Held. It treats ethics as grounded in relation, context, and real needs, not only rules or outcomes. It also has a second push: if women are to share public life, men must share care work at home. I’m interested in what care ethics looks like when you think through practice, not just through essays.
Choreocracy
Choreocracy names governance through the organising of bodies and movement. I borrow it from The Hospitality game (Tova Gerge, Ebba Petrén, Gabriel Widing), where it reads as a long history of rule through motion. Other people use it differently, for staged politics or audience-choice dance works. I use it to point at how power shows up as directions, timing, flow, and posture.
Choreography, Expanded
Expanded choreography treats choreography as the organising of movement and relation beyond dance for a stage. It can mean structuring social situations, conversations (so not just movement of bodies), thoughts even. At some point you might want to ask, ‘what makes this choreography as opposed to say, organisational design, or meditation, or town planning?’. And that is a very good question. I suppose it’s about the heritage and context in which the person is operating and thinking, which give a different emphasis, quality and value to the activity.
Expanded Choreography follows Sculpture in the Expanded Field (Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 essay), Expanded Painting, Expanded Photography and others as part of the “expanded turn”, a series of shifts in artistic practice and art history theory since the late 1960s, moving beyond traditional mediums and categories to incorporate new media, contexts, and critical approaches. In art history and criticism, “turns” refer to significant methodological or theoretical shifts that reorient the field of study. Beyond the expansion of mediums, these have included the Social Turn, The Archival Turn, The Global Turn and The Spatial Turn.
Choreography, Social
Social choreography can mean two related things. In Andrew Hewitt’s book of the same name, it is how choreography models or shapes social order. In another common sense, it is an art practice that actively arranges how people relate in real situations. I use it when movement, grouping, timing, and attention feel like the medium.
Choreophilosophy
Choreophilosophy is my term for thinking about how philosophy happens, not just what it says. Lectures, seminars, offices, books, screens, and habits of attention all shape thought. If you change those conditions, you may change what becomes thinkable. It asks what philosophy looks like when you treat its settings as part of the work. See also Philosophical Carpentry.
Choreographic Ecosystems
A choreographic ecosystem is a network of people, things, spaces, rules, and cues that shape movement and relation. It borrows from ecology, but it stays small-scale and practical. It fits work that looks like a workshop, a game, a shared practice, an installation, or a “happening”, where the piece lives in how parts affect each other over time.
Choreographic Object
A choreographic object is a thing or setup that invites, directs, or provokes movement without being a dance in itself. William Forsythe uses the term for objects, scores, or arrangements that shape how bodies move, pause, or relate in space. The choreography sits in how the object is used and responded to, not in fixed steps or performers.
Conceptual Metaphor
Conceptual metaphor describes how we understand abstract ideas through concrete forms. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson show that metaphors do not just decorate language but shape how we think and reason. In my work, How Many Things to Build the Future conceptual metaphor becomes something to work with physically: ideas are built, handled, and rearranged so their assumptions can be seen, shared, and changed.
Consent
Consent is a clear and willing agreement to take part in something, given freely and with understanding. In participatory performance and photography, it applies to subjects, participants, and audiences, and includes how terms are set, how consent is checked over time, and how power shapes the ability to agree, refuse, or withdraw.
Embodied Cognition
Embodied cognition is the view that thinking is shaped by having a body, not just a brain. Perception, movement, habit, and feeling help form how we reason and decide. It pushes back against older mind-first views. For me it matters because attention, posture, and setting change what people can notice and do.
Erotic Body
The erotic body names a form of embodied intensity that is not limited to sex, but includes sensation, desire, attention, and connection. It describes how bodies register aliveness, pleasure, and capacity for relation. Audre Lorde frames the erotic as a source of knowledge and power rooted in feeling, while Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes about how this capacity is shaped, blocked, or exhausted under contemporary social and economic conditions. In this work, the erotic body helps think about intimacy, care, and attention as political and embodied forces rather than private experiences.
Face of the Other
The face of the other names an encounter in which another person cannot be reduced to an object, role, or image. It describes a moment where presence itself makes a demand.As described by Emmanuel Levinas, this idea is useful here for thinking about being seen, care, and power, and for situations where looking or handling carries responsibility.
Feminist Epistimology
Feminist epistemology asks how power and social position shape what counts as knowledge. It looks at who gets heard, what gets treated as “objective,” and how bias hides in norms. It often values lived experience and context as part of knowing, not as noise around it.
Homeopathic Art
Homeopathy claims dilution can keep an essence. “Homeopathic art” is my critical term for work that dilutes its source material through many translations until the link only survives in the wall text. The piece may still be good, but the “aboutness” can become a story you have to be told. It is a warning to myself as much as anyone.
Nanopolitics
Nanopolitics (the London-based group) used the term for politics lived through small bodily choices and shared sensibilities, not party scales or policy scales. It is about how people meet, flinch, care, comply, desire, work, and resist in close range. The “nano” points at tiny operations that still shape a collective life.
Non-Representational Theory
Non-representational theory (linked to Nigel Thrift and others) tries to focus on practice, action, and everyday doing, not only meaning and symbols. It looks at habits, skills, affects, and how things unfold in real time. I treat it less as a fixed theory and more as a prompt: describe what happens, not only what it stands for.
Particpation
Participation is central to my work: pieces people do, not just watch. Games, workshops, live roleplay, and scored situations let meaning appear through action, not explanation. I like participation when it sharpens attention and relation, not when it becomes forced cheerfulness.
Passivity
In everyday use, passivity means not acting or not responding. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s sense, passivity names the fact that we are affected before we act: perception and bodily response arrive first, and choice follows. That second sense makes passivity part of agency, not its opposite.
Philosophical Carpentry
A term by Ian Bogost suggesting a way of doing philosophy by making things. Instead of only arguing in words, it builds objects, games, tools, or setups to test ideas in use. The aim is to see how ideas work when people handle them, follow them, or live with them. See also Choreophilosophy.
Practice-Based Research
Practice based research makes and does as a way of finding out. The practice is not just an example of ideas. It is the method. The outcome is often a mix: a work, a process, and some writing that shows what the practice discovered and how.
Punctum/ Studium
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes calls the studium the part of a photo we can read through shared culture: subject, context, style, intent. The punctum is different: a detail that grabs you personally, often by accident, and is hard to explain. The studium invites interest. The punctum hits.
Relational Art
Art that puts human relations at the centre. Instead of making an object to look at, the artist sets up situations where people meet, talk, act, or make decisions together. The work lies in what happens between people rather than in a finished thing, an idea shaped in the 1990s by the critic Nicolas Bourriaud when he wrote about art as a set of social relations.
Somaesthetics
Somaesthetics is an interdisciplinary and international research project that treats the body as a site of thought, judgment, and value. It combines philosophical analysis with bodily practice, and asks not only how bodies feel or move, but how bodily habits are shaped by society and how they might be changed.
Work Sketch
A work sketch is a work that exists as a proposal, score, or set of rules, even when it is not being performed. It often needs enactment to fully appear, but it does not rely on an audience to count as a work. The term is discussed by Hetty Blades in relation to my games and participatory works, where the piece can sit dormant yet still be complete as a work.