some of the images on the walls of the room that we organised toward

Gina the Giraffe – Echo Battle

Lunch plate diagram

The proper way to eat a Danish lunch plate

Responding to the diagrammatic proposition from Sydney, suggesting that we make a spacetime echo of dinner to breakfast, we decided to have lunch as if it was dinner. We turned on Australian tv (after having watched some Bunuel on youtube (link later)) and watched Australian late night news whilst eating. Effects: we spent a long time discussing cultural eating habits, particularly how it’s Danish custom to eat a lunch plate in a particular order.

Listen to the sound file echoing our conversation while you study the lunch plate diagram to the right. Sound echo of the lunch-dinner conversation

Fernand Deligny

Hi everyone, we are excited about getting the conversation going from Sydney! This morning we will start by speed-dating around the concept of the outside (more romantic than it sounds!).

In the meantime, I am sending some images that I used in my talk last night.

These are diagrams created by autistics in conjunction with Fernand Deligny, who ran a series of encampments for autistics in Monoblet France from the mid-sixties to the late nineties. These were done over 20 years on tracing paper and were created out of a desire to diagram the experience of movement. The autistics were mute (as many are) and so the drawings became a kind of language in movement that served less to demonstrate their movements than to activate a thought in movement.

From my paper, The Shape of Enthusiasm:

Over the years, building on this explicit mandate to invent modes of relation that do not necessarily rely on words, a singular iteration of experience in the making begins to take the form of maps of movement, tracings, as Deligny calls them.^[1] These tracings, a collaboration between the network and the autists, become incipient cartographies of an associated milieu of relation that builds on the way movement and life-living interrelate.^[2] The challenge, as Deligny conceived it, was to learn “to see language from the point of view of a mute child,”^[3] (Toledo 2007: 679). A choreographic proposition.

Together, farmer and child, intern and child, writer and child, filmmaker and child, militant and child, share a life that is parsed in hundreds of ways by the necessity of the everyday – the washing of clothing, the leading of goats, the building of encampments. From these daily tasks, tracings on paper emerge that outline the shiftings between sites and the reorientings of territories in the moving, tracings that magnify the moreness of habitual pathways. These tracings at once trace the regularity of habit and routine and the unrepresentable of its drifts. They do not reproduce movement, they activate it. Deleuze writes:

A cartography is suggested today by Deligny when he follows the course of autistic children […] All these lines are tangled. Deligny produces a geo-analysis, an analysis of lines which takes his path far from psychoanalysis, and which relates not only to autistic children, but to all children, to all adults (watch someone walking down the street and see what little inventions he introduces into it, if he is not too caught up in his rigid segmentarity, what little inventions he puts there), and not only their walk, but their gestures, their affects, their language, their style” (2007: 128 my emphasis).^[4]

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^[1] Jean Oury remembers Deligny’s frustrations with the language of psychoanalysis while still at La Borde, particularly in any encounter where patients’ dossiers are foregrounded. For Deligny, what seems to be more important is the lived experience of co-existence, not how the patient has been evaluated in an institutional framework. “What matters, he would say, is the project. We could care less about thought” (Jean Oury, quoted in Toledo 2007: 638).

^[2] Whether or not the tracings were actually drawn-into by the autistics is not clear. “About the tracings – which he calls act-signs – we do not always know whether they concern the adults or the children. The border is mobile” (Toledo 2007: 644).  And yet, the tracings are absolutely a collaborative enterprise, a drawing-with of emergent spacetimes of recomposition. The traces, and especially what Deligny calls the “lines of drift” (lignes d’erres) allow the territory to “become seen,” they map into it its resonance as more-than a pre-existent territorial enclosure.

^[3] The tracings are a way of learning not to speak “about” autistics in their presence as though they had no language, or as though their experience didn’t count. This would only feed the already ingrained institutional habits Deligny wanted to usurp. But something had to be made of the experience – these were the tracings, the creation of a movement-with that could lead the group to see anew. Sandra Alvarez de Toledo speaks of “machines for seeing,” a modality of seeing that does not return to the eyes themselves [le regard] or language. The tracings “made seen the forms of the human absent from the image of man” (2007: 799). Isaac Joseph writes, “the maps were an attenuated and aestheticized echo of the work in the presence of the children,” a project to teach the adults how to see the autistics’ lines of drift, “how to see a common territory without subject or language, to see-with-it (s’Y voir), despite themselves” (in Toledo 2007: 684).

^[4] In Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi translates “lignes d’erre” as “lines of drift.” In Dialogues, translated the same year by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam as “lines of wandering.” I’ve re-translated them here as “lines of drift” to keep the text consistent. Though “erre” does have the sense of wandering, I like the sense of drift as not being necessarily activated by the human, but also in the environment, in a movement-with of emergent spacetimes.

[…]

Tracings, layer upon layer, superimposed on tracing paper, harbingers, as Deligny refers to them, of “an immediate enthusiasm” that touches us without our knowing why, a touching that occurs not through the effects of language but beyond, where “something that cannot be seen” exists, something ineffable but nonetheless “immediately felt” (Deligny 1990).

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Erin

Diagram exchange Talkaoke

Here is our diagram exchange.Have fun!

Pdf: TalkaokeCoffeeThing

Video (for further understanding of the Talkaoke):

Presentation video: http://vimeo.com/33599615

Video from COP15: http://darc.imv.au.dk/?p=595

ECHO!

Synchronous Objects

For those engaging with Erin’s ‘Choreography as Mobile Architecture’ reading, it’s very well worth going to the Synchronous Objects site (you’ll certainly enjoy it—it’s really very interesting from all kinds of angles—great for data freaks and sceptics alike in a way). It’s also worth going to her own site, here, and clicking on both “textiles” and “Volumetrics”. These are the works she discusses towards the end of the chapter.

Mandala

At the risk of being labelled a damn hippy (having already posted links to dolphins and new-agey aphorisms) – i’m eternally fascinated with the Kalachakra Mandala and the strange desire and various projects to extrapolate it in new media forms – an echo of the techno-utopian promise of virtual reality and the way it came to be figured as a space for the extrapolation of an internal/conscious/sub-conscious mindscapes -its as if our minds were more at home in representation than in the body/world… – I love the way it ends up looking like a garish mc-mansion when rendered in 3D..

You can see those renderings here: http://kalachakranet.org/mandala_kalachakra.html

The ritual rendering in sand here…

a simple life.

my diagrams are always absurdly complicated but the forms of emergent complexity I’m interested in are often formed of a mutual recursion of relatively simple/minimal terms or functions.

so while its simple to the point of aphorism and might well belong on a gap tshirt I quite like this from designnotes.info..

perhaps – to add some meat to this – there might be a point of discussion/exploration about the generative potential, or perhaps the instrumentality of diagrams, their relation to/within a ‘sea-tossed world’ – the relative virtues or dangers of complexity and simplicity/clarity in diagrammatic interventions – thinking of Anna M’s engagement with network diagrams, and the diagrammatic energies, continuities of the neurosciences and/or cybernetics..

Petra Gemeinboeck

Hi, I’m Petra, living in Sydney (I used to say “currently living in Sydney”, but after more than 7 years, “currently” feels a bit less mobile and unrooted), and a Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media Arts at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW.

As a media artist, I’m interested in exploring notions of materiality and embodiment, and how they relate to agency and performativity. Coming from architecture, I’ve worked with a variety of media and “materials”, including creative robotics, interactive installation, locative media, and virtual reality environments. When I think about it, all of my works invoke a certain alien agency, involving participants in dynamic encounters with an always becoming, sometimes instable, and apparently wilful co-performer. Often this ‘co-performer’ immerses the participants in some way, surrounding them, overlaying their reality, or inserting itself into our built environment. Currently, I’m collaborating with the AI researcher Rob Saunders to develop a robotic practice that deploys robots as a medium of intervention, nestling itself into the architectural fabric of a gallery, and turning it into a destabilising playground for curious, social machines.

But before this post turns into an essay, I’ll move on to my contribution of a diagram for which I’ve chosen two examples:

The first is a simple diagram of a ‘living system’ and its interaction with its surrounding medium. I’ve taken this diagram from the publication “An Introduction to Maturana’s Biology” by Lloyd Fell and David Russell. The capture says: “A living system is autopoietic, (i.e. self-producing) and operationally closed. In its interaction with its surrounding medium it is structure-determined, not externally controlled”.

 

 

The second diagram is more of a dynamic generative diagram, taken from my locative artwork “Urban Fiction” (2007). The work imagined the city’s multi-layered fabric to be constantly rewoven, torn apart and stitched together again.

I was interested in the mutual relations between the urban space as it is practiced, ‘lived’ and as it is mapped. Using census data to specify the degree of permeability and elasticity, the map becomes a performative lens through which to read the production of spaces and zones. It is not a neutral, empty canvas to be inscribed but rather a dynamic process, whose next iteration is negotiated by a collective of participants. In this performative mapping practice, incoming precise numerical locations are read as events and intensities that turn the map into a field of contingencies and unfolding performances … twistings, raptures, stitchings …

The clip shows a montage of screen recordings, with the participants’ movements and encounters (top left), and three layers of the ‘urban fiction’ (top right, bottom left and bottom right). When the upper left monitor switches to black, the underlying dynamic forces are revealed.

I’ll stop here, and look forward to meeting you all next week! *Petra*