Hexagram-Concordia, Montreal
It’s been a busy day and I’m exhausted. There have been a lot of new names, projects and funding bodies to process and make sense of. I spent the afternoon in Engineering and Visual Arts (EV) building at Concordia and the top few floors are part of the Hexagram.
Hexagram-Concordia is a centre for research and creation located within Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Its state-of-the-art labs and equipment provide a collaborative environment for faculty and graduate work in interdisciplinary domains relating to arts, media and technology.
I attended the inaugural Hexagram Graduate Colloquium (13:00-15:00) which was very interesting; Harry presented some of his work-in-progress and talked about the resonances between the (relatively) uncelebrated work of Adelbert Ames Jr. and that of Deleuze & Guattari. Ames’ demonstrations – as experimental apparatus – bring to the fore processes at work, illustrating at the same time our resistance to change (see here, for an example). I’ve included the abstract of the talk at the bottom of the post.
Later on, I sat in on the Ozone meeting in the TML (16:00-18:00).We went round the table introducing ourselves and what our research interests were. I tried my best to explain what my work was about and why I was spending time at the TML. Due to Xin Wei currently being on sabbatical, the meeting had a certain urgency to it. The discussion was a tangle of grant proposals, themes for the lab over the next five years or so (which included material science, gesture, memory and acrobatics!) and involved plenty of talk about programming languages.
A commitment to building events with the public, outside of the lab, seemed strong and the Ozone team often came back to what a project’s ‘deliverables’ (which seemed to equate to output or application) might be. One suggestion was that the lab’s aim should be to sketch out ideas (without worrying about the fine details), leave them to one side, then come back to them with newer technology. This iterative method sounds intriguing, but does it leave room for new projects or concerns?
TITLE: The Architecture that happens.
KEYWORDS: event selection; neo-transactionalism; radical empiricism; performance and architecture
ABSTRACT: Looking to an older vocabulary in the psychological-philosophical literature of perception, the “transactional” view holds that living is an evolving process which includes space, time, environment, and organism in one durable whole. A segment in time of this process may be labeled a “transaction” (Dewey) or an “occasion” (Whitehead) in which all aspects of the process are contained, including purposes, past experiences in the form of orientations, and the future in the form of expectancies. We modify this formulation in a neo-transactional, or interactional (from physics) manner to construe the past and the future as operative fields functioning in two directions simultaneously in an evolving, living present of an extended duration.
By way of something of a historical detour, I’d like to revisit the radical empirical work of the American “transactionalists” conducted in the early half of the last century by Adelbert Ames, Jr., and his research collaborators during the course of their research in visual and social perception at the Dartmouth Eye Institute (DEI), and, later, at the Institute For Associated Research based in Princeton, New Jersey.
Two problems I am framing for further explication in my dissertation research and practice, here tentatively considered and refracted through a re-consideration of the Ames Demonstrations in perception, are:
- Some physiological stimulus is probably necessary to experience, but by itself it is not sufficient. There must be, in addition, some basis for an entity’s “choosing” one from among the (practically speaking) infinity of external conditions to which an impinging pattern might be related. The discovery of the factors involved in this “choosing” activity becomes the key problem. If we label the cultural nexus of actual occasions (Whitehead) an “event”, then this operative process of selecting from the “possibilities of fact” (Deleuze, after Wittgenstein, in FB, p83) can be termed an “event selection.”
- If the perceptual field reflects or is extensive to an organism’s individuated experience, then sensation— the physical feeling or affect resulting from something that happens to or comes into contact with a body— constitutes an impersonal and pre-individual domain antecedent and adjacent to it. This field can not be determined alone as that of a consciousness (Deleuze). The key problem, then, becomes the determination of the architectural (rather than the biological, more properly the domain of physiology) conditions for the composition of temporal experience, a precursor to understanding an event— the Architecture that happens— especially a selection of artistic interest.
This post is tagged colloquium, event, laboratory, radical empiricism, TML