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Ecologies of Relation: Collectivity in Art and Media

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Ecologies of Relation: Collectivity in Art and Media Ecologies of Relation: Collectivity in Art and Media Christoph Brunner A Thesis in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture Interdisciplinary PhD in Humanities Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD in Humanities) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada October 2014 © Christoph Brunner, 2014 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES This is to certify that the thesis prepared By: Christoph Brunner Entitled: Ecologies of Relation: Collectivity in Art and Media and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Humanities) complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to originality and quality. Signed by the final examining committee: Chair Dr. M. Gagnon External Examiner Dr. A. Munster External to Program Dr. O. Chapman Examiner Dr. B. Massumi Examiner Dr. X.W. Sha Thesis Supervisor Dr. E. Manning Approved by: Dr. J. Potvin , Graduate Program Director January 6, 2015 Dr. A. Roy, Dean Faculty of Arts and Science Abstract Ecologies of Relation: Collectivity in Art and Media Christoph Brunner, Ph.D. Concordia University, 2014 How can relation be considered a creative force in the composition of experience? Investigating the status of relation in art, media, and philosophy, this thesis outlines an account of research- creation as a creative practice and tool for analysis. Research-creation, a term used to describe creative practices comprising artistic and theoretical components, provides the backdrop for a more general discussion of the production of knowledge beyond human cognition. By taking a radical empiricist approach, the thesis proposes to include preindividual, affective, and more- than-human elements in the conception of experience. From this point of view, experience is always relationally composed and manifests itself dynamically as an “ecology.” One way of developing a theory and practice attentive to such ecologies of relation resides in the notion of the collective, which refers here to a dimension of experience that exceeds the mere grouping of individual elements under a common interest, ideology, or social bond. The first chapter analyzes collectivity and relation as activities of emergence and becoming. Considered as ecological activity, collectivity emphasizes how experience comprises spatio-temporal dynamics constituting embodied, actual events and their singular forms of knowledge. Using the work of the SenseLab as exemplary, this chapter clarifies how research-creation might be better understood as an investigation into aesthetic and conceptual practices that mutually shape how forms of knowledge and experience co-emerge. From here, the focus on the ecological relation moves toward immersive media environments, which emphasize perception as a relational act of immediation. Immediation as relational act challenges the paradigm of mediation between humans and machines, and instead inserts their activity into an ecological dynamic. In this chapter, research-creation interlaces with concerns in the field of digital aesthetics. Consequently, the entanglements between different temporalities in digital media processes require a rethinking of affect as a temporal operation, which is the focus of chapter three. In chapters four and the conclusion, research-creation as a relational-ecological practice opens up toward political concerns in urban planning and activism, respectively, allowing for the development of an extended conception of the aesthetic politics of the collective beyond art and academia. From a final speculative outlook the thesis asks how an ecological and collective account of research-creation might turn philosophy into an aesthetic and political practice of activation. Acknowledgements The passage from year to year, from life-line to life-line could never have been possible without the support and care of the collectives I am allowed to share a life with. I thank Amélie, Julien and Jonas for their patience, love and understanding of my moods, absence and stress. I thank my family for the unlimited support and as lucid thinkers making me understand the wider context of life. I thank Erin Manning and Brian Massumi for the endless generosity and joy, for being what keeps a strong believe in the practices we care about alive. My gratitude goes to the SenseLab as the place from which all thoughts and feelings about the collective arise and come back to. It is also the place of joy, of inventing techniques for life-living taking the collective capacities of how life might become to new dimensions. I owe much to the care, genius and companionship of my friends and colleagues Érik Bordeleau, Nasrin Himada, Troy Rhoades, Bianca Scilar, Sven Prothmann, Heather Davis, Joel McKim, Stamatia Portanova, Tyna Fritschy, Gerald Raunig, Roberto Nigro, Gerko Egert, Alanna Thain, Jonas Fritsch, Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen, Diego Gil, Sher Doruff, Felix Stalder, Christian Hübler, Yvonne Wilhelm, and many more. It is because of them that I learnt: no thought comes on its own but always through a collective. I would also like to thank Sha Xin Wei for being patient and always supportive, full of joy and asking many questions from a different most refreshing angle. I thank Giaco Schiesser for the freedom and time granted. Special gratitude goes to Luciana Parisi and Jochen Bonz who were giving me the best imaginable orientation at crucial moments in my academic life. I thank Jeffrey Malecki for the fabulous editing and helpful comments. Table of Contents LIST OF FIGURES ix INTRODUCTION 1 Involution // Texturing // The Chapters CHAPTER I RELATIONAL REALITY AND THE COMING COLLACTIVE Prelude 18 First Movement: The Act and its Relation 20 Relation and Experience // Terminus // Bare Activity, Act, Supported Action // Techniques of Relation // The Relation-of-Nonrelation // Belonging as Technique // Perishing as Technique // Relational Movement – Moving the Relation // Analogous Thought in Action Second Movement of the Coming Collactive 46 Intuition of a Practice // Collectives and Art // Relational Aesthetics – Aesthetics of Relation // Institution: Context and Situation // The Collective and the Nonhuman // Collective and Transindividual Individuation CHAPTER II BECOMING ATTENTIVE TO THE UNKNOWN: IMMEDIATION AND PERCEPTION Prelude: Panoscope – The Horizon’s Edge 79 First Movement: Immediation and Media Ecologies 82 Operation // Media Ecologies of Practices // Processes of Mediation, Re-Mediation, and Mediality // Towards an Incorporeal Materialism // Technicity and Element Second Movement: The Politics of Perception and Digital Aesthetics 109 Introduction // Attention and Attentiveness as Threshold // Perception as Modulation // Dynamic Event Contours // Digital Aesthetics and Mattering Bodies // Attentive Habit and Non-Sensuous Perception // Prospectus of Research- Creation in Digital Aesthetics CHAPTER III 129 AFFECTIVE POLITICS OF TIMING: ON EMERGENT COLLECTIVITY IN RAGNAR KJARTANSSON’S THE VISITORS Introduction // Framing Affect and Sensation // Virtual Time Forms and Depth of Field // Techniques of Amplification and the Ethics of Event- Ethologies // Qualitative Quantity – Seeds and Crystals of Time // Resisting the Present INTERLUDE 160 RHYTHM, CONSOLIDATION, TRANSDUCTION: ON FRANCIS ALŸS’S RAILINGS Rhythm’s Relational Movement // Matter and Counterpoint // Consolidation, Transduction and Insertion // Undoing Dialectics? CHAPTER IV 173 DIAGRAMMATIC URBANISM: PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE AS PRACTICE OF ACTIVATION Introduction // Procedures over Products // The Aesthetics of Diagrammatic Practice // Matter and the Microphysics of Power // On Metamodelization CONCLUSION 204 HOW TO RELAY A MOVEMENT? ON ANONYMITY AND INTERCESSORS Introduction // First Series of Anonymity // Second Series on Gestural Media // Time-Folds of Research-Creation as Activist Practice NOTES 233 BIBLIOGRAPHY 247 List of Figures Figure 01 – Ben Van Berkel, Diagram Möbius House Figure 02 – Gordon Matta-Clark, Untitled (Energy Forms) Figure 03 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Informal Use and Nonconforming Figure 04 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Propped Bungalow in Tijuana Shantytown Figure 05 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Favela Scaffolding Figure 06 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Scaffoldings Figures 07 and 08 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Pixelation Figure 09 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Diagram of political stakeholders (Casa Familiar) Figure 10 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Negotiation processes Figure 11 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Transborder Traffic, southwards Figure 12 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Border Postcard Figure 13 – Estudio Teddy Cruz, Political Equator INTRODUCTION “There is always a collectivity, even when you are alone.” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 152) “For politics precedes being.” (Deleuze/Guattari 1987, 203) “Change and life are synonymous. We have to admit and accept it. Change is what makes life interesting. There is no progress, change is all we know.” (Marcel Duchamp in Gold 1958) Involution Relation there is. Add movement to the mix. Think movement and relation, relational movement, always coming in multiples. Relational movements form a multiplicity through resonance – a collective act. This is what constitutes the real, a relational realism. Take the collective as that which holds together across the thresholds of virtual and actual elements of time, thought, matter, space, and feeling. Consider this relational moving-collectively as activity. Experience is activity. Experience is all there is.
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