The annual conference of the collaborative research centre Intervening Arts (SFB 1512) ‘Dynamics of the Intransitive: Undirected Interventions’, is dedicated to artistic procedures and practices that do not pursue an explicit political or critical agenda but that nevertheless, or precisely as a result, draw forth their specific potential for intervention. As guiding aspects of such interventions, improvisation, obstinacy, and objectlessness will be explored.
Improvisational practices move playfully between normativity and freedom, setting impulses and offering them to other actors for further work. Obstinacy, as an artistic attitude, develops creative spaces of interruption within firmly established power relations in order to escape pregiven rhythms. Finally, some practices of the visual or performative arts derive their effect from an objectless execution.

Even if these interventions are not directed towards a goal, they irritate, disturb, interrupt. Their procedures are those of repetition, refraction, and displacement. They are practices in execution — the beginning and end of which often become apparent only retrospectively — that remain precarious and can ‘slip’ again and again. They keep themselves open to others and other things; they gain their intervening power from their (dis)continuity with the every-day and the established.

The annual conference opens dialogue between artists, scholars, and the public through performances, lectures, and discussions and in shared experiential spaces.