Transpositions Familiar to Artists, This Book Shows How Moves Can Be Made Between Established Positions and Completely New Ground

ORPHEUS New modes of epistemic relationships in artistic research ORPHEUS Research leads to new insights rupturing the existent fabric of knowledge. Situated in the still evolving field of artistic research, this book investigates a fundamental quality of this process. Building on the lessons of deconstruction, artistic research invents new modes of epistemic relationships that include aesthetic dimensions. Under the heading transposition, seventeen artists, musicians, and theorists explain how one thing may turn into another in a spatio- temporal play of identity and difference that has the power to expand into the unknown. By connecting materially concrete positions in a way Transpositions familiar to artists, this book shows how moves can be made between established positions and completely new ground. In doing so, research changes from a process that expands knowledge to one that creatively Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators reinvents it. in Artistic Research Michael Schwab is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal for Artistic Research (JAR). He is senior researcher of MusicExperiment21 (Orpheus Institute, Ghent) and joint project leader of Transpositions: Artistic Data Exploration (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz; University of Applied Arts Vienna). Transpositions INSTITUTE Edited by Michael Schwab IN ISBN 9789462701410 S TIT U T 9 789462 701410 > E SERIES Transpositions cover final.indd 1 05/07/18 14:38 Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research TRANSPOSITIONS: AESTHETICO- EPISTEMIC OPERATORS IN ARTISTIC RESEARCH Edited by Michael Schwab Leuven University Press Table of Contents 7 Introduction Michael Schwab 23 Transformations Rosi Braidotti 33 Abandoning Art in the Name of Art: Transpositional Logic in Artistic Research Esa Kirkkopelto 41 Calling the Dragon, Holding Hands with Junipers: Transpositions in Practice Annette Arlander 59 Aberrant Likenesses: The Transposition of Resemblances in the Performance of Written Music Lucia D’Errico 75 Work of Art as Analyst as Work of Art Laura González 97 Annlee; or, Transposition as Artistic Device Leif Dahlberg 117 Transposing the Unseen: The Metaphors of Modern Physics Tor-Finn Malum Fitje 135 Staging Collisions: On Behaviour David Pirrò 149 Algorithms under Reconfiguration Hanns Holger Rutz 177 Speculations on Transpositional Photography Birk Weiberg 191 Transpositionality and Artistic Research Michael Schwab 5 Table of Contents 215 Transpositions: From Traces through Data to Models and Simulations Hans-Jörg Rheinberger 225 Transposition Cecile Malaspina 245 Transduction and Ensembles of Transducers: Relaying Flows of Intensities Paulo de Assis 267 Alchemistic Transpositions: On Artistic Practices of Transmutation and Transition Dieter Mersch 281 Ineffable Dispositions Mika Elo 297 Without Remainder or Residue: Example, Making Use, Transposition Yve Lomax 6 Introduction Michael Schwab Orpheus Institute, Ghent; Zurich University of the Arts; University of Applied Arts Vienna While notions of transposition have emerged in different disciplines and fields of study, there seems to be something particular about how the artistic appro- priation of the term articulates the movement of research. Rather than repeat- ing basic definitions of the concept as it is used, for instance, in music, where it refers to a change of the key of a composition, or in linear algebra, where the term denotes the switching of rows and columns in a matrix, the authors of this book speculate what kind of transpositional operations may be implied as research develops. While it is impossible to compare the diverse approaches collected here to find a single new definition of the notion, there seems to be sufficient agreement that the kinds of transposition, which are of interest in the context of artistic research, operate outside registers of representation, resemblance, or mimesis. Since these notions suggest a functional identity between two things, for instance, a score and a performance or a sitter and his or her portrait, the change of position that a transposition affords cannot be so potent that it disturbs this identity. Conversely, if the change of position affects what something is—that is, if an identity does not underlie a difference but may emerge from it—a new non-representational, transpositional logic is required in which something at its previous position is not easily reconciled with what appears at its new position, altered as it is by the move. We may also express this by saying that the logic of representation is singular, remaining the same across different instances, while the logic of transposition is multiple, needing to be transposed from instance to instance. The positional specificity that is part of transpositionality—whether in space, time, or otherwise determined—thus explains why it has been so difficult to approach transpositional operations philosophically, and why artistic research, which is sensitive to the specifics of what is at hand, may present new options not only for a bottom-up rather than top-down approach but also for an approach for which there is no “up,” only positions that result from movement. Such transpositional operations require a particular emphasis on the dif- ferential aspects of the relationships enacted between positions. To do so, a number of chapters refer to quantum mechanics, for example, through notions of entanglement as discussed by Karen Barad (2007), while others emphasise literary devices, such as analogy or metaphor to show that language has always had the ability to create relationships with the unknown, working with it rather than against it. Hence, a number of the book’s authors suggest that transpositional operations may even be fundamental to the formation of meaning despite the difficulty of assessing their epistemic importance. A focus on the 7 DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662538.ch00 Michael Schwab multiple logic of transposition complicates our episteme, allowing more com- plex phenomena to emerge that cannot be traced formally. The methodologies, epistemologies, and aesthetics that have been developed under the umbrella of “artistic research,” in particular under transdisciplinary conditions, may offer relevant resources in order to productively engage such complications. At its limits this leads to more radical understandings of existent definitions of “transposition,” suspending given orders in favour of orders emergent from materially situated, concrete operations at hand in a practice lending a more speculative dimension to an otherwise merely functional concept. This book accepts the resulting radicalisation of the concept of “transposition,” and by carrying “artistic research” in its subtitle suggests that artistic research may be a context in which seemingly functional concepts can gain a new lease of life as new potentials become emphasised. Such work on concepts is not without a precursor. In my previous book in this series, Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research (Schwab 2013a), for instance, I proposed a more coherent use of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s term “experimental system” in the context of artistic research, made possible by Rheinberger’s work to complicate everyday notions of “experimental system” as they are used by practitioners and not observers (Rheinberger 1997, 19). Practitioners, according to this assumption, use concepts differently—not as foundations for a theory to be confirmed, but as operational “scarcely imagina- ble basic concepts” (Rheinberger, ibid., here quoting Freud) that drive knowledge for as long as they are productive. Such practitioners’ concepts have the potential to exceed their status as “technical objects” and become “epistemic things.” While the former are needed in a research environment to create stable conditions, the latter are what is epistemically underdetermined and, thus, able to develop into future knowledge. As Rheinberger suggests, a cer- tain amount of deconstructive labour is needed not so much to deploy such concepts as those practitioners do but to articulate them together with their characteristic fuzziness or “epistemic noise,” as Cecile Malaspina (2014), one of the authors of the present volume, might describe it. The same is true, to introduce a second example, of Catherine Malabou’s work on the brain, where with “plasticity” she comes across a concept central to neuroscience—“we run into this word in every neurology department of every medical school and of every university hospital” (Malabou 2008, 4). Yet, despite the ubiquity of the concept, she argues that through a confusion with notions of “flexibility” it had not been realised that “the brain is not already made” (ibid., 7) and that not only neuroscience but all aspects of culture are part of a process of formation outside which nothing is given. Like “experimental system,” “plasticity” may be a concept readily used to describe the crucial, productive part of a system that awaits complication. As such concepts are taken on, new potentials are realised not determined by what we believe them to mean. This includes new possibilities for action—now, however, not in control of a phenomenon but deeply implied. As these examples from non-artistic disciplines illustrate, when referring to the relevance of artistic research for such operations, the suggestion is not 8 Introduction that they can only be made from within the field of artistic research; rather, today something “artistic” seems to be needed in other areas of research in order

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