I’ve really enjoyed reading these write-ups from the workshop.

I love the description of the experimental music in this one. I think this is what experiencing experimental music is often like. From my point of view, it’s not an art of crowd pleasing, to say the least; more about trying out something which you believe has potential and then observing what the response is. Usually a few people hate it, a few like it, sometimes one or two have completely transformative experiences, and the rest are just a bit bemused. I do think there is value in that state of being unsure how to respond or what to make of something.

Would you mind posting a link to these pages on the EwG discussion board please? It would be great if people could find their way here from there.

All the best,

Michael

http://www.michaelgallagher.co.uk/experimental-methods-network/viewforum.php?f=9

It was nice to see that you had included Eric’s comments after-the-event too… it was very poetic.

t

what a great wee site you are producing! I have just started my own blog which you can check out at http://www.merlepatchett.wordpress.com.

Your narration of the whole EwG experience was like a revisit for me, an momentary escape from the dull aesthetics of Edmonton – thanks!

Merle

The quote from Himada and Manning really sums it up for me, and is a timely riposte to critics who denigrate micropolitics as somehow ‘soft’, ethereal, or worst of all, liberal.

The very threat, or sheer radicalism of micropolitical spaces, experiments and moments is their incompleteness and what I see as their deliberate lack of ontological coherence (i.e. no rallying cry emanating from a coercive politics of identity, that is to say, an unethical politics of forced meaning).

That said, and as you point to in your response, there is still the ongoing question of how we mobilise micropolitics and in particular, how we understand, animate and deploy affect without its capture. Guattari of course suggests ethico-aesthetic experiments which SenseLab and others have done a lot of work to bring into being, but perhaps for social activist collectives who continue to work along traditional lines of affinity, there is still more convincing to be done regarding the potential of micropolitics, not as concept, but as device(s).

In response to your question on how 3Cs kept the virtual open, I’m not sure where to go with this, partly because I think one aspect of the virtual is that you can’t close it down – sure, there are limiting processes which can be enacted, but to borrow from our conversations with Derek McCormack, even constraint can be generative. Perhaps the only concrete example I can give is that 3Cs are determined to state the partiality of the cartographies, and that they outward keep the virtual open by opening their cartographies, in very material terms (i.e. interactive maps online). No doubt though that 3Cs could think some more on how to generate different virtualities/affects…

I think that Christoph is not looking to shut out the world (singular) but create other worlds where things are not quite what they seem, where we are forced (or simply encouraged?) to react, to think, to live differently. For example, it might be that in the panoscope, gravity could work differently to what we are accustomed to. How might we move if the tendencies of the world are not what we expect? That’s perhaps too simplistic an example but I was trying to get at how the panoscope might offer the chance to experiment and challenge the very notion of ‘lived space’…