View of downtown Montreal

Now in the last week of my stay in Montreal, I am preparing to head back to Oxford. There’s been a lot to take in and at times, I’ve wondered what research materials I am generating. I recently filled in a Graduate Supervision System (GSS) entry on my ‘progress’ this term and thought I might include it here as a (somewhat limited) summary or reminder of some of the things I’ve been doing and thinking since I arrived.

I have spent this term in Montreal, where I have been exploring a variety of spaces of aesthetic experimentation. Affiliated to both the Topological Media Lab and the SenseLab, as well as an active member of Hexagram (an institution for research-creation), this fieldwork has allowed for a prolonged engagement with notions of experimentation, interactive or responsive environments, rapid prototyping and ethico-aesthetic play, as well as collective action.

I have been involved in reading groups, classes, colloquia, workshops and aspects of experimental design. I adopted an experimental approach where I have sought to be not only an attentive observant but allow room for the research to unfold and develop in unexpected ways. An example of this has been working with a choreographer in the development of a theatrical production.

It has been very stimulating to work with people who have read similar philosophers to myself (such as Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, James, Whitehead) but also be able to share new avenues of enquiry (including, but not limited to, Bateson, Debaise and Simondon). Moreover, it has been fruitful to talk about my work to others, forcing me to rethink and refine aspects of my questions. One area that I’ve been thinking about in particular concerns collaboration, and how this might not necessarily result in some ‘thing’. Collaboration might be better thought of as processual, and not necessarily goal-oriented. This also relates to how to how I might address questions of participation, ‘critical distance’ and my role, such as it is, within the labs.

I have tried to generate materials through visual means (photos, video), textual (diaries, blog entries) and talks (recorded, remembered). Responding to the call to attend to registers which are neither talk nor text has proven more problematic but has been explored through diagrams.

I’m hoping to keep active on the blog when I return to Oxford – with an aim for more regular posts rather than flurries of them – and have a few book reviews that I’m working on at the moment. I’m also trying to translate one of Didier Debaise’s articles. As ever: watch this space!

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Pont de la Concorde, Montreal

Didier Debaise recently came to Montreal to present his current research, which Brian Massumi described as a speculative pragmatism. He explored the resurgence of speculative philosophy (philosophies?) of the past decade or so and is currently trying to put it to the test by asking if we can have a non-anthropocentric approach to the subject. Rather than do away with the notion of a subject, or extend what the human indicates, Didier would suggest that we retake all the categories of the subject and redistribute them across nature. In effect, he is asking: can we talk of subjectivity for non-humans? This refusal to begin with the human or, put differently, a development of propositions that are non-human, resonates with several philosophers whose work was largely ignored in the twentieth century: Tarde, Whitehead and James (in Europe).

In the second event, Didier went on to elaborate, making links between Whitehead and Simondon, outlining what sort of descriptions constructivism and speculative pragmatism do and explained his critique of anthropology (less a rejection, more a desire to highlight its limits). The conversation was lively and there was an interesting discussion on ‘distance’. Rather than create some kind of distance (“se mettre en distance”), Didier suggested that we need artifices, citing Deleuze’s claim that we need to make things resemble with methods which do not resemble one another (“faire ressemblant avec des moyens non ressemblants”). Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find the original quotation… although there is something similar in What is Philosophy?

Conférence publique / séminaire
Didier Debaise, Institut Max Planck, Berlin

Conférence

“Métaphysique des sujets. Reconstruire la notion de subjectivité avec Tarde et Whitehead”

18 novembre 18h00
SenseLab, Pavillon EV, Université Concordia, local 11.625
1515, Ste-Catherine Ouest, métro Guy-Concordia

Séminaire

20 novembre 9h30 – 11h30
11h30 – 12h00 lunch léger
Pavillon Marie-Victorin, Université de Montréal, local B-427
90, Vincent d’Indy, métro Édouard-Montpetit

Lectures préparatoires :
—Didier Debaise, « Qu-est-ce qu’une pensée relationnelle ? » (sur Simondon)
—Didier Debaise, « Une philosophie des interstices. Whitehead et la question du vivant »
—Bruno Latour, « Tarde’s Idea of Quantification »

If anyone would like to listen to the lecture and/or the seminar, please get in touch.

Queuing for Pecha Kucha #14, SAT

I went along to a Pecha Kucha evening recently (although already ten days ago!), after I was invited by Chris Salter. He mentioned:

If you haven’t been, it’s totally fun and crazily packed with people. It will give you a good slice of what is going on with the design, architecture, arts and technology communities here.

Crazily packed is certainly true! Not only did I have to queue to get in, but the SAT was heaving with people (certainly well over 600 people). Although I had been ‘back-stage’ at the SAT – well, upstairs, anyway – I hadn’t seen the space they have for public events. There are two enormous rooms and these were both teeming with people.

Pecha Kucha Montréal #14
a unique kind of meeting with the design community
20 images x 20 seconds x come to be inspired !

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
doors open @ 19:40
presentations start @ 20:20
SAT [Société des arts technologiques]
1195 Saint-Laurent
5 $

Pecha Kucha nights are unique, vital platforms for interdisciplinary exchanges and meetings organized with the primary objective of providing public forum in which creators from diverse horizons can present their thoughts and processes on projects that have been completed, are underway or that they are still dreaming about. The concept is simple: each participant presents 20 slides and comments on each one for 20 seconds.

Chris introduced the research he is doing in his lab (xmodal), part of Hexagram at Concordia and Luc Courchesne, the director of the Panoscope project, also gave a short presentation.

What is particularly interesting about xmodal is that is avowedly a studio-lab, a term which Chris himself takes from the work of Barry et al. (2008), which is where I discovered the term myself.

labXmodal is a studio-lab founded by Chris Salter dedicated to the research, development, and creation of performative environments – physical spaces with a focus on dynamic and temporal processes over static objects and representations. We research and develop new hardware and software sensing technologies, apply these tools and techniques in solo + collaborative, internationally disseminated artistic works and critically reflect on these practices through technical and theoretical/historical publications, talks and public presentations.

The evening was bizarre (people talking through the presentations, a bar open in one room, large screens on all walls) but of great interest and definitely entertaining. If only all conferences adopted this approach!

Pecha Kucha proves popular, SAT

Michael demonstrating his program, TML

The blog has been down for just over 24 hours. I apologise – it was completely my fault. I have been trying very hard to get my trackbacks to work and fiddled around with my SQL databases. Thankfully, I keep regular backups.

It has been a difficult time and at several points I thought I would not see my posts, let alone the website again. Thanks to Michael Fortin, of the TML, for helping (read: doing it all himself). The blog lives on!

Joe Gerlach, Cologne

There’s a great post over at Vernacular Mappings which attempts to ‘conjure’ the micropolitics at play in the recent publication of disOrientation². I think it’s great because Gerlach (2009) really tries to stretch and put at risk, in the Stengersian sense, the notion of micropolitics: neither small-scale nor situated on the ‘left’ or ‘right’ of the political spectrum, micropolitics operates transversally, activating the “affective potential of the interval between feeling and doing” (Himada & Manning, 2009: 5). I would like to quote at length from this paper, found in the recent issue of Inflexions, Micropolitics: Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics:

“For some, this may make it sound like a “soft” politics, but it’s quite the opposite. What is usually constituted as the real thing – Politics with a capital P – is far less rigorously inventive, precisely because it operates in the sphere of representation where precomposed bodies are already circulating. The micropolitical is that which subverts this tendency in the political to present itself as already fully formed. All politics is infested with micropolitical tendencies. This is what makes the political an event. In my opinion, much of political theory continues to invest too heavily in the already articulated “capital P” Politics. The reason for this is simple: it is extremely challenging to speak of what has not yet fully taken form. Like the microperception that tweaks the event of perception, the micropolitical is the force of the political event that potentially unmoors it.” (2009: 5).

Micropolitics, or the creation of techniques for collaboration, involve experimentation and an openness to be experimental. Micropolitics then, offers a point of departure for a new kind of politics.

The description of the disOrientation² project is rich and does not seek to reduce the mapping as a simple “case of resistance versus a nebulous hegemony, but instead it seems to offer tactics, or lines of flight for others to generate their own articulations of the university and beyond” (2009: 2, original emphasis). I liked the way in which it related the project to the SenseLab’s concept of a ‘technology of lived abstraction’ (the name for the lab’s new series of books): “an active platform of creative productivity and political movement” (Gerlach, 2009: 4).

The exploration of affect, increasingly well-honed with every iteration it seems, is refreshingly clear. It highlights what I find most interesting and productive about affect, that it does not start with the subject, and while it can be bodily it is not embodied. However, Gerlach does point to some difficulties of engaging with affect. One troubling aspect is his suggestion that we strive to animate affect; this seems to suggest that not only does affect exist a priori but that it is qualitatively different kinds of affect that we are generating by seeking to animate. I wonder if it is possible to write of affect without writing for affect.

Navigating the tension between disOrientation² as a representation and as a technology of lived abstraction is not straightforward. I would be very interested to hear how the 3Cs generated techniques to keep the virtual open, to allow space for the unexpected, to not know everything that is possible, when they were working on this project. Gerlach’s engagement with disOrientation²’s micropolitical articulations are at once exploratory and experimental, yet reach-towards a becoming-with the world. This is neither an idealisation nor a festishization of a concept (micropolitics) that has been put to work in a radically empirical manner. Bravo!

Laboratory life: a reflection, TML

Last week was really busy and I didn’t find time to post about it. So this is a chance for me to recount some of the things I’ve been hearing-saying-thinking-feeling… On Tuesday evening I attended a lecture/workshop organised by a variety of departments at McGill University and the SenseLab:

Ecosophy: Rethinking the Culture Concept with Félix Guattari
Nov. 10, 2009 – 5:30 PM to 6:45 PM
Arts Building, Arts 160 , 853 Sherbrooke Street West

Please join us for a lecture and workshop:
Janell Watson is an Associate Professor of French in the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Virginia Tech University, and incoming editor of The Minnesota Review.  Professor Watson’s new book, Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing Between Lacan and Deleuze, is a much needed guide to the individual writings of Felix Guattari.  Guattari’s own work (such as The Three Ecologies, Molecular Revolution and Chaosmosis), as well as his famous collaborations with Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?), are becoming increasingly influential particularly in relation to the study of media ecologies and what Guattari termed the ethico-aesthetical paradigm of contemporary art and critical thought.  Professor Watson will present a short talk, which will be immediately followed by a workshop for faculty and students around selections from Guattari’s books Chaosmosis (chapter 1,5 and 7)  and The Three Ecologies (entire text), as well as chapter 3 from Watson’s book entitled “An Energetics of Existence”.

Although it got off to a bad start – it felt like ecosophy was being used as a substitute for culture, and there was a long ‘question’ from the audience (about the abstract versus the concrete) – it picked up steam and there were some  stimulating interventions by Erin Manning and Chris Salter.

The evening finished in giggles as we heard from Brian Massumi about translating A Thousand Plateaus; when he wrote a letter to them to query parts of the text:

Deleuze would say ‘I have no idea, ask Félix’. And he would say ‘Whatever you think!’

After the talk I chatted with Erin and she invited me to attend a few classes that she was taking (normally taught by Brian), both over at l’Université de Montreal (UdM). Although longer classes than I am used to (around three hours or so), they were incredibly interesting, as well as inspiring. In the first class, on Wednesday, Erin wanted to to bring Guattari to life (“remettre en vie Guattari”), to show what an extraordinary thinker he was. Not only was it conceptually rich, but the examples she deployed and the diagrams she would scribble on the board really made me think differently.

The second class, on the Thursday, was a close reading of a few chapters from Whitehead’s (1933) Adventures of Ideas, where he seeks to define many of the concepts that he uses throughout his work. Although his writing is not seductive, Erin argued, it is incredibly precise. It was very useful to read the text together and work through some of the ideas, and we were reminded that we need to put these concepts to work (“il faut faire travailler ces concepts”). The classes were both in ‘Franglais’: predominantly in French (it’s a French-speaking university, after all) but with plenty of switching between the two languages.

After the class I made my way over to the CCA, for the second IRHA public forum:

IRHA Public Forum #2, Novemeber 12, 2009
Maison Shaughnessy
6:00PM

Interactivity: The City as Performative Space

Alessandra Ponte, University of Montréal
Patrick Harrop, University of Manitoba/Concordia University

New digital technologies increasingly are being deployed by architects, artists and designers in order to transform dead public spaces into new urban zones of performance and play. In effect, the city has become a responsive environment set in motion by pedestrians and new technologies.The second IHRA forum will investigate how concepts of interaction brought on from digital technologies meet concepts of social interaction. At the center of the forum will be artistic and design projects that also suggest new possibilities of interacting in public space.

Patrick Harrop, who collaborates with the lab, presented a paper which explored Gilbert Simondon’s enagement with architecture, through Le Corbusier, whilst Alessandra Ponte turned to a rather different philosopher: Peter Slotterdijk. On the Friday, at the third graduate colloquium of the semester, Patrick was able to discuss the same paper in more detail, with greater lucidity! I’m rather intrigued by Simondon, having not really encountered his work before coming to Concordia, who was trained by both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Georges Canguilhem and links are increasingly being made between his work, and that of Deleuze.

So the title for this post – Laboratory life – is supposed to be ironic, as I haven’t spent that much time in the TML!

Marathon de violoncelles, eXcentris

On Saturday I went along to eXcentris, conceived of as a laboratory, to see a collaboration between Matt Haimovitz, Du Yun and the TML. Although I only found out fairly late on, due to problems with the TML mailing list, I was lucky enough to get a complimentary ticket. The music was different to anything else I’ve heard before (check out Matt’s website to listen) and was comprised of interwoven compositions and improvisations. The TML – more specifically Tim and Morgan, along with Michael – were involved in the production of real-time responsive visuals which were captivating. These visuals were projected onto a collection of special sheets, just to one side of the musicians (see the photo below). They have been on a mini-tour together so I was very pleased to see them in action! I’m now hoping to find out how they went about making the visuals and how they worked with Matt and Du Yun…

Matt Haimovitz with special guest, Du Yun
FIGMENT – works for solo cello, electronics and video

Matt Haimovitz’s new album and tour, FIGMENT is the latest evolution of the world-renowned cellist’s signature solo set, embracing the contemporary musical communities of his two home countries, Canada and the US.

Inspired by centenarian composer Elliott Carter and his two Figments for solo cello, the program brings together a wide range of important new music for solo cello and cello and electronics by leading and emerging North American composers. From the Middle Eastern microtones of Gilles Tremblay’s Cèdres en voile: Thrène pour le Liban, to Ana Sokolovic’s Balkan folk-influenced Vez, from Serge Provost’s cutting-edge Les Vertiges de S. for electronically-processed solo cello, to up and coming composer/songstress Du Yun’s San, a deconstruction of haunting ancient Chinese fragments. The program also includes music by Steven Stucky, Luna Pearl Woolf, and sample-artist Socalled.

Haimovitz will be joined by composer Du Yun on vocals, laptop, and keyboard to perform their original song, Miranda, and to improvise segues between the composed works, creating a seamless musical arc.

Haimovitz and Du Yun will be accompanied by real-time responsive visuals created by Timothy Sutton and Morgan Sutherland of the Topological Media Lab, Concordia University, Montreal.

Show-time, eXCentris

Art as Research? Roundtable and discussion

The first session of this year’s Interdisciplinary Dialogues at Concordia took place on Friday and, with the theme ‘What is Research?’ to be addressed in a variety of different ways, opened with ‘Art as Research’.

What Is Research?
Session:  Art as Research
Roundtable and Discussion
November 6, 2009    1:00pm to 3:00pm     LB 659-4

The question “what is research” seems immanent to the pursuit of interdisciplinary studies in society and culture. Doctoral students in the Ph.D. in Humanities program engage with a broad range of subject matter as well as a great variety of methodologies and theoretical orientations.  This year’s Interdisciplinary Dialogues series addresses the question:  how does interdisciplinarity affect our understanding and experience of research?

In the first of a series of sessions, Doctoral Humanities students with a studio component to their doctoral project will reflect on the potentialities and challenges of practice-based research and what “research-creation” means to them.

Panelists:

Emily Rosamond:  “Space-Times of Research-Creation”

Randolph Jordan:  “Audiovisual Ecology in the Cinema”

Devora Neumark:  “Community Art and/as Academic Research”

David Jhave Johnston: “How I Prepared for My Comps by Scanning Books and Compressing Videos”

Joanne Hui:  “The Graphic Novel Travel Collage: Multiple Enrootings in a Physical Articulation”

Discussant:

Dr. Owen Chapman (Concordia, Communication Studies)

Panelists and discussant

The panelists were all very engaging and the topics were varied; the discussion was interesting although heated at times. I heard about frameworks for praxis, ecology and empathy, performative research, digital poetics and Bourriaud’s new book (The Radicant). There seemed to me though to be some kind of disjunct between research-based art practice and art-based research practice… Christoph, who had organised the event, described it as a “collective generation of something” which I thought was very apt!

Animated discussion

Hanging thread, Black Box

Patrick Harrop and his group of students from the University of Manitoba have recently left Montreal, having spent just over a week here visiting various studios and working on a couple of projects down in the Black Box. I was able to join them on a few of their trips, including a visit to Chris Salter’s studio, and was made to feel welcome in the basement. The students had been working on recordings, comprised of of eight different channels, and were able to experiment with the high-quality speakers provided by Hexagram. Projects included recordings of: the vibrations of a window, water pipes (using an ultrasonic recorder!), an underground intersection and a moving car. These compositions were presented to Patrick, Shannon (a PhD student at Concordia), Gerard (an improvisational musician) and myself. We would listen to the arrangements, then hear how it had been done (and why!), before listening to it once more. What I found most interesting was the way in which these architecture students were thinking about sound and space through resonance. They were looking at how buildings move, vibrate, change.

A different kind of scaffolding? Black Box

Patrick also had a project he was working on in the Black Box with Annie Lebel, an architect herself, also with an interest in resonance. We set up a kind of scaffolding, hanging wiring from the ‘grid’ (the patchwork of cables just below the ceiling, fom which you can attach things). We did this by filling ballons with marbles (four or five small ones) and then throwing them so that they would go through, and back down, the grid. The wiring was a translucent green and very hard to see; most of us ambled into some of the suspended wires and pulled them right out. It was very much a hit-and-miss exercise, with several attempts needed to throw a balloon hard (and high) enough to reach the grid and then go through it, but it made for an elegant randomness. From this simple infrastrucutre, other (yellow and orange) wires were attached to run across the green wires and were connected to small motors. These motors would then give life to the transversal wires, creating oscillations and a flurry of movement.

These experiments are very exploratory and were not set up with a hope to ‘find out’ something, other than to play with wiring and see what might happen. Patrick hopes to continue this project, on a smaller scale, within the TML when he returns in mid-November. I’ll be interested to see whether he looks to re-create what he has already done (a miniature replica?) or whether he continues to experiment and push what is possible with just wires, balloons and marbles.

As for myself, I’ve been experimenting with visual methods and include a short video shot in the Black Box. I would recommend you watch it in HD, available if you move your mouse over to the top right-hand corner of the video; the music is from Murumari’s Pathscrubber EP (which, incidentally, is free). Let me know what you think – I’m still learning how to operate my camera (Kodak Zi8) and software (Adobe Premiere Elements 8), as well as the vast array of possible video formats you can produce… I feel that it has taken up quite a lot of time and I’m not too sure what it ‘adds’ to my work. Still, if I’m not prepared to fail then I’m probably not being (becoming?) experimental. Please let me know what you think.

I also include some other photos, which were kindly shared by Justin – one of the architecture students – who has a lovely SLR camera. He climbed a ladder to take a photo of the tables in the centre of the room, and later on, photographed me getting in on the action, throwing a (marble-filled) balloon up to the grid.

The hub from above, Black Box

Throwing and hoping, Black Box