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!

t

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!

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

Laboratoire Art&D, SAT, Montreal

On Wednesday Christoph Brunner from the SenseLab invited me to go along with him to the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) to see the Telepresence project that he is involved with there. We met just outside the Art&D lab – no public access – and met with Mark who is working on the technical side of things. He showed us the contraption they have assembled (I’m not sure it has a name) and how it worked. Christoph is presenting a paper on the project in early December and is interested in the philosophical aspects of the device, how it might offer new ways of experiencing and interacting with the world. It’s very much a work-in-progress and although it is driven by practical concerns (for example: how might you be able to chat to someone and see more than just their face, how might you be able to collaborate differently on projects, how might conferences work if they weren’t limited to lecture theatres) but there is room to play with the settings to create novel situations or environments. The machine (see below) is large and can shut once you are inside. There are cameras filming you and videos move around as you move yourself. So, if you were talking to somebody, their video would follow you around and you wouldn’t have to worry about where you looked because there would be cameras able to film you from a variety of angles.

Telepresence project, SAT, Montreal

A day earlier, on Tuesday, there had been a ‘Show and tell’ session in the TML. Adrian Freed had been invited to talk about his work in experimental music. Adrian is part of the Center for New Music & Audio Technologies (CNMAT), which is based on IRCAM, where he used to work ¹. We heard about some of the projects Adrian had been involved in and he had many interesting things to say (including about music and space). He is currently playing with e-textiles as the flexibility of fabric offers him more freedom. Naveed and Laura presented some of their work as well (on ambisonics and magnetism respectively) and there was plenty of discussion afterwards. The rest of the week was fairly quiet and I spent most of my time in the lab, either reading (all sorts) or writing (in my diary, or on a series of short essays I hope will feed into my work).

Show and tell, TML

—————————————————————————————————————————–

Sofas and coffee table, TML

I was invited to initiate a conversation about my work this afternoon, in the TML. Unfortunately it clashed with a lecture at McGill and so several people could not attend; however, there were several people from the lab and beyond. In attendance were Xin Wei (lab director), Harry Smoak (co-founder of the lab, now doing a PhD), Jen Spiegel (a PhD student from Goldsmiths), Christoph Brunner (a member of the SenseLab) and Yu Satow (a Masters student in the lab).

I introduced my work as best I could, explaining my interests and the literature I had been reading. I also outlined the aims and questions of the research and my methods. You can listen to some of the conversation here:

We chatted for another hour or so after the recording stops, discussing among other things: field-sites, collective action and intuition. I really enjoyed the chat and it was good to be asked questions about my work – it made me think carefully!

Avenue-Parc / Fairmount Avenue Intersection, Montreal

This weekend has been fairly quiet but I met up with Xin Wei to continue our discussion about the TML, in a lovely café called ‘Le Figaro‘, on Saturday. We had a really great conversation about his plans for the lab, his ideas about ‘thick experiments’ and also how to go about creating events where you can palpably encounter concepts. We swapped different readings that we liked and when I finally left and looked at the time, four hours had gone by!

The first week or so has been rather intense and so it’s been nice to have a long weekend (it’s Canadian Thanksgiving) so that I can recover. I’ve explored some of the surrounding area and played around on Google Map Street View, which has just launched! Good timing.

I don’t have a schedule for the forthcoming weeks but this is what’s lined up for tomorrow:

Please come join Thomas Jellis from Oxford for an introductory conversation about spaces of aesthetic experiment and ecologies of practice.

4:30 Tuesday October 13
TML EV7.725

Thomas Jellis is a DPhil student in the School of Geography at the University of Oxford.  His research focuses mainly on science and technology studies, philosophy and non-representational thought.   He’ll be a resident researcher at the TML till December.

Xin Wei
Please come for a chat, plus drinks afterward!

Black Box, Concordia, Montreal

It was an early-ish start at the lab today, meeting Xin Wei around 10:00-ish. We were to help Michael Montanaro move equipment down to the Black Box, in the basement of the EV building. It’s an enormous space which is often used for Hexagram events. The project that Micheal and others in the building (including the TML) are working on is called ‘Frankenstein’s Ghosts‘:

a collective creation-research project to build a hybrid critical discussion and performance work based on the substantive issues raised in Mary Shelley’s seminal novel, Frankenstein.

I’m hoping to spend some time with Michael and Jerome (who’s interested in responsive environments) in the Black Box over the next week or so. I’m wondering if the name is literal (it is a black box-like room) or a play on the Latourian notion (he uses the term to describe when something’s inner workings are no longer open to scrutiny)!

Panorama of the Black Box

Table-top Theatre, TML

‘Experimental Phenomenology: Memory, Identity and Place’ is the name of a collaborative project between Xin Wei and the philsopher David Morris (whose hand you can see in the photo above, pointing his finger). The aim of the work is get a sense of the connections between memory, identity and place by developing experiments.

The development of these experiments involves two axes of exploration: a substantive one, concerned with place, memory, identity, especially in relation to the body, movement and things; a methodological one, concerned with how to go about doing phenomenological experiments. Here we might note two things about phenomenological experiments: first, they would be more focused on enabling precise descriptions of experiences, from a first person point of view and tracking the dynamics of the individual experience, rather than quantifying over populations according to variables already specified by the experimenter; second, they would be more focused on arriving at the conceptual framework proper to the experience generated in the experiment, vs. constructing an experiment to fit an already given conceptual framework—or at least they would keep open this arrival.

To prepare for these explorations there are a series of orienting seminars, or reading groups. The set readings provided introductions to phenomenology (which focuses on the experiencing subject) and looked to facilitate discussion about how to engage with these ideas in a tangible manner. Experiments, David argued, disrupt the usual in order to describe differently. So here, the aim is to set up situations that complicate our usual relations. It was fascinating to see how the group (including students from both Concordia and McGill) went from the texts to something which could be done in practice. In fact, before we started talking about the readings, one of the students demonstrated an experiment-in-progress: the table-top theatre.

Above a simple white oval table was a camera, linked to a computer and a program which could modify and project on to the floor, just to the side of the table, what was happening on the table. Using a combination of time-delays and other alterations there were some really surprising effects. Everybody crowded round the table, eager to see themselves projected onto the floor. What was interesting was the remarkable difference between watching others do it, and trying yourself. I was a little bit self-conscious but I moved a pen around and watched my hand appear in two different parts of the table on the projection: the program had been changed yet again and was displaying a different time-delay for each half of the table!

I had to leave before the end of the meeting as I wanted to attend the talk that Chris Salter (whom I had met at the colloquium) had invited me along to a to: ‘Architecture, Urbanity and the Temporary’, the first public forum of a project called ‘The Ephemeral City‘.

IRHA Public Forum #1, October 8, 2009
Maison Shaughnessy
6:00PM

Architecture, Urbanity and the Temporary

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, McGill University
Chris Salter, Concordia University
Cecile Martin, Independent Artist, Architect and Curator

The 21st century city that was formerly dictated and constructed chiefly by architecture and planning models is increasingly being shaped anew daily by temporal forces: the dynamics of unstable financial markets and fluctuating economic patterns of consumption and leisure, the rise of ecological processes and practices, the transformation of public space by the methods of branding and multi-sensory design and last, but certainly not least, the dissemination of new ubiquitous technologies of surveillance and monitoring.

The first IRHA forum will investigate the ethical, political and ecological stakes in this new urban theater of temporariness, instability and transformation.

Chris and Alberto Pérez-Gómez talked about Frederick Kiesler (a really interesting figure, not least for his laboratory at Columbia University) and how we might conceive of architecture as potential new ways on inhabiting the world. Cecile Martin’s talk was equally fascinating: she discussed the work of champ libre, a nomadic organisation interested in ephemeral works. I spoke with her at the end of the evening and although she’s no longer involved with the group encouraged me to make contact with group… watch this space!

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.