By Micah Sébastien Zhang

So…Ingold……

Tim Ingold, the author of the book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, has presented an innovative perspective into media studies, especially the realm of production. Rather than viewing the production as a fixated, point-to-point linear path, Ingold sees production as a cumulative process that goes beyond the traditional, distinct boundaries between the creators and the creations. To further define that, Ingold thinks that the creation, or "making" as suggested by this book’s title, is a self-evolving process that entwines with the materiality and thought within creation itself.

This view into creation and media can be peeked within the chapter 7 — Bodies On The Run, in which he explored his topic deeper on the concept of body. Upon reviewing the two sculptures shown in the figures — in which one of them (Simon Starling, Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore)) was covered with mussels — he critically compares the forms between the original sculpture, Warrior with Shield by Henry Moore, and the modified piece and claims "where the former is a movement of opening" while "the latter is bent on closure" (Ingold p.94). His explanation is that the infested piece with mussels denoted a fact that "its surfaces have opened up to the surrounding medium" rather than being "wrapped up in itself that any residue of animate life has been stilled" (Ingold p.94). Drawing from the theorist Joshua Pollard, Ingold argues that the process of "making" takes similarity between the relationship between objects, subjects, and things as they "can exist only in a world already thrown, already cast in fixed and final forms; things, by contrast, are in the throwing – they do not exist so much as carry on" (Ingold p.94). Within this process, people are also "processes, brought into being through production, embroiled in ongoing social projects, and requiring attentive engagement" (Ingold p.94 via Pollard 2004: 60).¹

Of course we have bodies – indeed we are our bodies. But we are not wrapped up in them. The body is not a package, nor – to invoke another common analogy – a sink into which movements settle like sediment in a ditch. It is rather a tumult of unfolding activity.

—— Tim Ingold, p.94

Nevertheless, this article’s focus is not on Pollard or any other theorists. The focus will be on the arguments proposed by Tim Ingold and Andy Clark, and we will see how their views come close together.

So Who’s Andy Clark (out of all the names from the reference list)?

Andy Clark (he/him/they) is a cognitive philosophy professor from the University of Sussex at United Kingdom. According to his biography page, his research interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He has proposed the idea of "the extended mind" and co-wrote the article The Extended Mind — the article that Ingold has also cited² — with the Australian cognitive scientist David Chalmers.

So What Did They Say?

Clark and Chalmers argued in their article that the cognitive process does not completely rely on an internal process, but rather having external environments as attributes that constantly play a role in cognitive processes. They have made a pretty straightforward and summative description on this idea at the start of their article, in which they " advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes" (Clark and Chalmers p.7). Ingold has personally described that their theory "postulates that the mind, far from being coextensive with the brain, routinely spills out into the environment, enlisting all manner of extra-somatic objects and artefacts in the conduct of its operations" (Ingold p.97).

We propose to take things a step further. While some mental states, such as experiences, may be determined internally, there are other cases in which external factors make a significant contribution. In particular, we will argue that beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.

—— Clark and Chalmers, p.12

We can take a look at a simple way to comprehend Clark and Chalmers’ theory by examining the example they gave in their The Extended Mind article. In their example (Clark and Chalmers p.12-14), an exhibition is happening at the Museum of Modern Art at 53rd Street. One person, Inga, recalls in her mind that the museum is at 53rd Street, so she successfully goes to the right place. Another person, Otto, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and can’t recall the museum’s location in his head, but he also successfully arrives at the museum by looking at the note of the museum’s location from his notebook. Inga used memory retrival to get the information from her mind, and Otto did the same thing by retriving the same information from his notebook. Clark and Chalmers argue that since they achieved a congruent result even while retriving information in a physical and tangible or cognitive and non-tangible way, Otto’s notebook in this case can be recognized as the congruent component to a cognitive mind, as "the information in the notebook functions just like the information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief" (Clark and Chalmers p.13). Considering that Otto constantly uses his notebook, it can be viewed as "central to his actions in all sorts of contexts, in the way that an ordinary memory is central in an ordinary life" (Clark and Chalmers p.13).

And So How Do They Connect To Ingold?

Both viewpoints from Clark and Ingold presented an acknowledgement to the nuances and complexities lying within the process of mediation. Considering that both Clark and Chalmers have worked as cognitive scientists, we, in my humble opinion, might be safe to assume that they started off their idea on a more scientific approach, in which their theory draws more similarities and explanations from natural sciences than humanities.

However, Ingold proposed to push the idea further and more expanded in the realms of humanities and mediation. He argues that the sole "interactions" between the mind and materialistic objects do not fully constitute as the integral process of making (Ingold p.98). He argues that this general idea focuses too much on the external materialistic attributes to constitute or to define the whole cognition experience of engaging with the world. Rather than embracing this idea, Ingold was drawn more to the concept that regards thinking as more of a kinetic and dynamic flow, which reflects on another opinion by Sheets-Johnstone (Ingold p.98).

My Own Thoughts?

Even though we could see some differences between Ingold and Clark’s ideas, their theories and interpretations still provide some abundant insights to explain media studies in some more innovative perspectives. Personally, I found that their ideas are sufficient enough to explain my thought of interpreting mediation as a dimensional perspective. This idea will be further explained and discussed in my upcoming blog article here.

Thank you so much for your attention.

Works Consulted

“Andy Clark.” University of Sussex, profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p493-andy-clark. Accessed 27 Oct. 2025.

Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, vol. 58, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3328150.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Media Usage Statement

The feature image in this article was published under the CC0 Public Domain License. The source of the image can be found here.

Footnotes

1. Here’s the original citation of Pollard provided in Ingold’s book: Pollard, J. 2004. The art of decay and the transformation of substance. In Substance, Memory, Display, eds. C. Renfrew, C. Gosden and E. DeMarrais. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 47–62. ↩

2. The book’s original citation: Clark, A. and D. Chalmers 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58: 7–19. ↩