Invisible intensities

Abstract

This essay explores how, over the course of writing biographical articles about women artists into Wikipedia, the online crowdsourced encyclopedia, I became moved, touched, changed through interactions with digital materials. Following the initial exhilaration of submitting a first edit, I consider how other surprising intensities unfolded through sustained participation in this collaborative creative activity. Relating these to Kathleen Stewart's concept of ordinary affects, I wonder about how these intensities came to be and imagine where they may lead, turning to the artful methods of poetry and digital collage to map connections which escaped encyclopedic rendering. Ultimately, I suggest these invisible intensities reflected emerging posthuman relational subjectivities and corresponding possibilities for affirmative creative action.