VAP MY

For more than two decades, arts and humanities departments in universities in Europe and America have been engaged in supporting different models and debates aimed at consolidating the relationship between theory and practice. These discourses have produced multiple configurations such as practice as research; directed practice; mixed mode research practice; and practice through research, among others. These new practices have fostered interesting questions: What if an object using sounds, senses and non-linear narratives theorises? What if there is no distinction between the components of affects, precepts and concepts? And fundamentally, is art or creative research looking at this world or its antithesis?

This problem of the academic theory/practice debate remains pedestrian but can be coupled to debates about trans-meta-posthumanist and decolonial ideas. We have reached a point where the practices of non-human material agents are as active as the mental practices of human agents (ideas).

How to move away from the dominant quantitative epistemologies and habits of modern research? Simondon (Hui, 2016) connects invention to an action of the future in the present. The moment of invention is when the two potential sets click, connect, couple into a single continuous system. A new synergy begins. A new "regime of functioning" has suddenly leapt into existence. A "threshold" has been crossed, like a quantum leap to a qualitatively new plane of operation.

The quantum leap is a theoretical tool of Barad's and, at the same time, the subject of his study. Here is the definition:

Quantum jumps are not jumps (big or small) through space and time. An electron making "jumps" from one orbit to another does not travel along a certain continuous trajectory from here-now to there-then. ... What makes a quantum jump different from everything else is that there is no certain answer to the question of where and when they occur. The point is that it is the internal interplay of continuity and discontinuity, determination and indeterminacy, of possibility and impossibility that constitutes the spatio-temporal differences of the world. (Barad 2007)

Karen Barad

According to atomistic metaphysics, space is a container and time is cut into successive fragments. The fact that we do not treat these assumptions as assumptions, or their effects as effects, is because we are used to atomistic metaphysics. We have always thought that the world was made of discrete objects and one-dimensional finalities, and interactions took place between individuals that pre-existed the exchanges. According to Karen Barad's (2007) agential ontology, or rather ethico-onto-epistemology, "individuals" do not pre-exist as such, but rather materialise in the event of intra-action. Bodies are not objects with inherent boundaries and properties, they are discursive material phenomena. Barad's concept of intra-action is central to developing a new understanding of the whole visual image and materiality beyond the limitations of traditional realism (positivism) and linguisticism.

From mousse 34

The usual notion of interaction assumes that there are individual independently existing entities or agents that preexist their acting upon one another. By contrast, the notion of “intra-action” queers the familiar sense of causality (where one or more causal agents precede and produce an effect), and more generally unsettles the metaphysics of individualism (the belief that there are individually constituted agents or entities, as well as times and places). According to my agential realist ontology, or rather ethico-onto-epistemology (an entanglement of what is usually taken to be the separate considerations of ethics, ontology, and epistemology), “individuals” do not preexist as such but rather materialize in intra-action. That is, intra-action goes to the question of the making of differences, of “individuals,” rather than assuming their independent or prior existence. “Individuals” do not exist, but are not individually determinate. Rather, “individuals” only exist within phenomena (particular materialized/materializing relations) in their ongoing iteratively intra-active reconiguring.

“Phenomena,” in an agential realist sense, are the entanglement—the ontological inseparability—of intra-acting agencies. (Where agency is an enactment, not something someone has, or something instantiated in the form of an individual agent.) It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of “individuals” within the phenomenon become determinate and particular material articulations of the world become meaningful. A specific intra-action enacts an “agential cut” (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent distinction —between subject and object), effecting a separation between “subject” and “object” within the phenomenon. In particular, agential cuts enact a resolution within the phenomenon of some inherent ontological indeterminacies to the exclusion of others. That is, intra-actions enact “agen- tial separability”—the condition of exteriority within phenomena. So it is not that there are no separations or differentiations, but that they only exist within relations. Putting the point another way, phenomena are differential patterns of “mattering”— diffraction patterns dispersed across differently entangled spaces and times, or rather spacetimematterings. The notion of intra-action marks an important shift in many foundational philosophical notions such as causality, agency, space, time, matter, meaning, knowing, being, responsibility, accountability, and justice.

It is perhaps worth noting that while Cartesian epistemology is built on the given-ness of a distinction or a Cartesian cut between subject and object, the epistemology of agential realism, or rather its entangled ethico-onto-episte- mology, goes to a set of prior questions. Agential realism does not start with a set of given or fixed diferences, but rather makes inquiries into how diferences are made and remade, stabilized and destabilized, as well as their materializ- ing efects and constitutive exclusions. Since cuts are understood to be enacted rather than given (it is the cut that makes the individual and not the other way around), all manner of questions regarding the nature of mattering come together here—that is, questions of matter in the multiple senses of meaning, being, and valuing.

Previous Notes

maya deren - Kenneth anger

independent cinema: david lynch - Lost Highway - mullholand drive

AVANT GARDE as attitude ('the spirit of the avant grade', rebellious, against the image of authority )

AVANT GARDE as context ('the European Avant Garde')

Surrealist manifesto Andre Breton

Sigmund Freud the unconscious mind - the world of dreams

Canonical films of the European Avant Garde:

1. Surrealist

Un chien andalu = an andalucian dog

By Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel

2. dadaist movement / dadaism (childish, palyful)

entr' acte

By Rene Clair

3. hell unlimited

By Norman Maclaren

4. Emak Bakia

by Man Ray

Some key words presented in class

bleak ?

oppresion ?

humour - absurd ?

against logic / rationality ?

Against good taste = bourgeoisie ? (middle classes)

"épater la bourgeoisie" (to scare mainstream society, or to scare the dominant echelons of society)

Abstract Cinema

Against representation / realism = stage drama

1. Realist Aesthetics

2. forms of narration = how we sequence time

Abstraction is not necessary something non representational in the image

Vision:

quarks / quantum physics

cosmology / stars / nebulas

spiritual visions / internal vision

mandala

Examples:

fantasia walt disney

oskar fischinger

stan brackhage: the streams of the mind had a grammar

cat's cradle

atmosphere = against external reality

non-objective image

Jordan Belson

Cosmology

Whitney brothers - lapis and yantra 1965

Len Lyle - Particles in space

Harry Smith

absurd

impressions / logic / feelings / sensations

inger lise hansen / michael snow (la region central, 1971)

Callum Cooper - London-based artist filmmaker

Malcom Le Grice - Berlin Horse (music by Brian Eno)

Kurt Kren - tv

The Tree of life - Terrence Malick

reference

“end of semiotics” (Leone, 2015)

https://www.academia.edu/11425425/2015_-_Double_Debunking_Modern_Divination_and_the_End_of_Semiotics

media philosophy, Luciana Parisi (2012)

the notion of objects (algorithms) operating at the heart of cybernetic architectures, which generate a logic that is abstract and infinite, and lie beyond direct human cognition and control.

Walter Mignolo’s decolonial critique of visual hegemony (1995)

Maurizio Lazzarato’s “Video philosophy” (1996).