Rancière, via Shadowplay (TEI ‘24)
What it says
A social and technical system decides, before anyone acts inside it, what is available to be seen, said and done. Art becomes critical by interfering with that distribution — not by depicting a problem, but by redistributing who gets to perceive what.
Does it hold for my work
Only if I take the direction where the installation is about power. That was live while I was working on Brutalist Pix2pix, where the question was who decides what a building should look like — the AI or the body in front of it.
Under v4 the question is about strangers building meaning together, and Rancière does not reach it. He would tell me what the room permits; he would not tell me what two people made of it.
Why it is parked
It is a very heavy theory to carry for the amount of work it does here. If the thesis needs an account of who is allowed to perceive, I would rather get it from something closer to the body than from aesthetics-as-politics. Parked, not deleted — the Brutalist strand may come back.