the cybernetic conflation of biological surprising. Rather, the example provides A thousand tiny interfacings: and technical of which Simondon is so an opportunity to consider some of the fertile acts of resistance. dismissive [6], which Massumi creative potential of interfacing and its describes as the ‘industry philosophy’ ability to complicate the event. I want to Andrew Goodman [7]. This extension of the ‘prosthetic use this work to rethink the place of the Monash University Department of Fine function’ of the interface is utilized as a interface within the paradigm of process Art, Melbourne, AUS. method of controlling ‘a relay point in philosophy, and to put it to productive Email: the dissemination of human ordering use as a differential tactic within an art
into a realm of expansion onto which interface might provide a logic of self- the human projects itself’, with real regulation capable of internally driving Abstract difference erased as the body the creation of intensities of resonance This paper examines the process of interfacing ‘disappears behind a techno-logical or disturbance through connection. between organic and technical objects and how this might be utilized as a tactic to promote invention shield’ [8]. This subjectification of the within new media art events. Raphael Lozano- technical object, Munster has pointedly 2. Interfacing Hemmer’s Relational Architecture is examined in relation to concepts of parasitic action and folding termed ‘interfaciality’, a codification as I propose to begin by thinking to show how the work develops a complex ecology face to face, rather than body to temporally rather than spatially, by of relation through interfacing. machine relation [9]. thinking of these interfaces as moments
Keywords: Interface, parasite, folds, Nevertheless, the primary sticking rather than points of action or relation. concretization, ecology, autopoiesis, relation. point for any level of discussion of the This suggests that the interface might interface within process philosophy now be thought of more as a process of remains that its distinctive identity relies interfacing, as an unfolding or 1. Introduction on it being a privileged site of contingent process within a larger nexus These spaces between are more interaction within an otherwise inert of relation, as an in-action moment of complicated than one might think…less representational system. In this paper I intensity of disruption, contrast and a juncture under control than an want to attempt to show some ways in invention rather than a privileged or adventure to be had. Michel Serres [1] which one might think through the static position within an art event. process of interfacing as a creative force Here I will briefly consider the idea of Philosopher Brian Massumi has argued within an art event without succumbing an art event as a machine producing that the interface is an unsustainable to the type of static, representational transductions of forces, before concept within a process-centered models of which Massumi is justifiably attempting to unpack the creative role of world. As a ‘privileged site of critical. interfacings in Re:Positioning Fear by mediation’ within a system, he argues, To do this I am going to examine a suggesting that interfacing might [2] the idea of the interface as a prime particular incidence of interfacing that productively parasite, fold or concretize; site of creativity and interaction denies occurred in Raphael Lozano-Hemmer’s three different, though sympathetic, what in process philosophy might be work Re:Positioning Fear: Relational concepts concerned with intensive seen as the relational nature of all Architecture 3, (1997), in order to organization and creativity. entities. Massumi’s philosophical stance consider ways in which some unplanned emphasizes the ‘primacy of processes of interfacings between a public and the 2.1 Differential machines becoming over the states of being technical assemblages of the work In this paper, I am going to use the through which they pass’ [3], that is, the helped to develop a greater level of both terms ‘body’ and technical object’ in fact that any entities that are interfacing self organization and openness in the specific ways. Following Katherine with each other are themselves event. But, while I am certainly going to Hayle, the ‘body’ referred to here is in composed of relations. As such, discrete suggest in this paper that an interesting no way limited to the subject or to a interfaces are problematic in that they shift in agency in the work occurred, fixed or post-individuated stable entity, might be seen to imply a world moving from those preconceived by the but can be taken to be always in- inhabited by ideal, internally stable artist to a new shared and emergent process, corporeal and enactive rather objects, between which interactions agency developed through an than ‘the body’ in any coded sense [11]. occur. The interface’s role, in such interfacing of a public bringing their This is in sympathy with Deleuze and modes of thinking, is to rejoin entities own intentions and tonalities to the Guattari’s notion of a body as ‘a that are by implication discrete, and the event, I do not wish to overstate the discontinuous, non-totalized series of complexity of continued unfolding and uniqueness of the case. Certainly, as processes, organs, flows, energies, relation to the dynamic virtual or Lozano-Hemmer has said, the events corporeal substances and incorporeal potential is then greatly diminished. were significant in his rethinking of the events, intensities and durations’ [12]. There is indeed much to be critical of ways in which he staged further Similarly the term ‘technical object’ as in the privileging of the interface. As Relational architecture iterations [10], used here implies not a fixed object in Massumi notes, it can promote a naïve however this does not necessarily imply the material sense, but is used to address excitement in ‘the joy of connection’ that the occurrences were particularly a technical or non-biological entity that and undifferentiated flows of out of the ordinary for such large-scale is itself capable of becoming, leaving information, an unquestioning, utopian interventions, which are necessarily the term ‘machine’ open for another promotion of ‘interface, for interfaces’ always composed of multiple and often use. sake’ [4], that fits in perfectly with contradictory intentions and forces, and Machines, as Guattari tells us, are any Capitalist models of circulation and can potentially head in numerous systems that produce an effect; they surplus-value [5]. To this one might add directions, both predictable and function immanently and pragmatically
Please reference as: [Author(s)-of-paper] (2013) [Title-of-paper] in Cleland, K., Fisher, L. & Harley, R. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium of Electronic Art, ISEA2013, Sydney. http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/handle/2123/9475 Page numbering begins at 1 at the start of the paper.
[13]. Massumi, in expanding on this viscosities, of formerly disparate things But in the case of Re:Positioning Fear, notion, explains that they are ‘not within a becoming-concrete system a more interesting and radical disruption subordinate to utility or laws of [22]. occurred in the unfolding of this work resemblance’ [14]. Guattari’s concept An art-event might be such a machine: (which was already primed for playful gives us three potentially useful ideas regulating and producing affectual intervention and evolution). It was in that help to expand the concept of the flows, a ‘machinic of expression rather this catalyzing moment when, through machine, in a decidedly non-humanist than a signifying apparatus’ [23], a parasitic action, a new and more direction. Firstly, the need for an producer of movement or difference complex machine was produced. understanding of the role that the wider [24]. This, I want to demonstrate, Alongside the positioning of their ecology in which technical objects are positions interfacing as a prime creative shadows on the façade to activate the embedded (or with which they unfold) force-form, for, as Deleuze states, hidden text, participants began to has in determining what potential is ‘difference, potential difference and synthesize a different work out of the actualized. Machines here are difference in intensity [is] the reason components by engaging specifically in ’proximity grouping[s]… [of] man-tool- behind qualitative diversity’ [25]. play between their projected silhouettes. animal’ [15]. Secondly, an Seeing interfacing as a machinic action Here they utilized the potential to understanding Guattari perhaps shares implies a shift in the design of art events radically alter the size of their shadows with Simondon that machines inherently to emphasis their machinic potential: to engage creatively with one another. contain potential beyond their their productive capacity or capability to For example, a wheelchair bound immediate actualization, ‘ontogenetic produce difference, rather than for their participant created a giant image of elements’ [16]. That is, they are held aesthetic qualities. It is this operation of himself and ran down everyone else together not so much by any physical the interface as a differential machine [30], while other participants played bond, but by a shared virtual milieu, as that the rest of this paper addresses with puppet mastering smaller shadow an ‘assemblage of possible fields’ [17] through an unpacking of Re:Positioning bodies and with the making of multi- that develops through the process of Fear: Relational Architecture 3. limbed combinatory beings [31]. concretization. Thirdly, that we must The ‘parasite’ as described by Michel consider machines not through utility or 3. Re:Positioning Fear Serres, is an inherent noise in a system representation, that is, as not being Re:Positioning Fear consisted of an of relations that forces into existence ‘limited to [their] materiality or orchestrated shadow dance composed of new logic, new combinations, and new functionality’ [18], but in terms of their a projected conversation thrown onto orders of exchange [32]. It disrupts as it productive capabilities. Guattari’s the architecture of the city that was produces something else (excessive) conception of the machinic here shifts made visible within participants’ through its (mis)translation of relations, the assemblage from ‘what is it shadows that were also cast on the composing an indeterminacy within any composed from/what is it an aggregate surface, creating silhouettes of differing event of relation. of?’ to ‘what does it produce?’ sizes depending on their distance from This free shadow play was, I would Such machines, as Munster states, the light sources. suggest, a kind of parasitic noise operate to produce and regulate flows As Andreas Brockman writes [26], the feeding off the energy already flowing between the poles of movement and work initiated a dynamic ‘social inter- through the work to create new paths, organization, between the qualitative or facing’, constructing a ‘fragmented and expressively [33], and to creatively diagrammatic and concretization [19]. heterogeneous system of engaging bifurcate relations. That is, it was an Thus perhaps one might propose that different publics in a variety of specific action that both continued to they are producers of the transduction of ways’ [27]. Here Lozano-Hemmer, as qualitatively express something of the force: of a process by which such ‘an he often has, employed the bodies of the original relation (moving shadows activity sets itself in motion’ at the same participants as disruptive ‘performed’ revealing text on the building’s surface), time as it generates ‘processes of interfacings [28] within a machine while at the same time producing a new modification’ [20]. composed otherwise of technical relation through the same initial forms. objects. This melding of technical The contemplative and reflective 2.2 Transduction objects with the unpredictable input of a rhythm of movement in the large-scale It is perhaps common to think of public presents one possibility of text was overlaid with the noise of a interfaces as translators of code, points providing the technical elements with an quick and teasing play of shadows, of information exchange, from digital to expanded potentiality, with the creating a tension, a clash of intentions analogue or visa versa, or as a ‘point of interfacing body playing the role of and tonalities: gaps and contact where humans and machines ‘transducer between machines’ [29]. miscommunications. meet in order for exchange to take Here the connection between biological These parasitic actions existed on place’ [21]. However to assert the and technical objects was a tactic to multiple levels, at different scales; they primacy of the flow of forces rather than generate difference, not collapse it, to operated throughout all the the secondary exchanges of text, produce ruptures or gaps in the process transductions of form-force taking transduction, I would argue, is a better of ‘dephasing’, (in which a stable place, wherever interfacing occurred, way to fully think the event of identity is delineated from ongoing producing excess. For example, as interfacing. That is, as this paper will processes of becoming). bodies overtly disrupted light to create discuss below, transduction positions new imagery, there was also a more interfacing as the integration, through 3.1 Parasitic noise subtle disruption of intention, with the the flow of forces of differing artist’s intentions (or perceived potential
of the work) interfacing with the resonance’ within the system [37]. Thus but as a force of qualitative change, of participants’ disparate motivations to it was a tactic that re-immersed or re- affective tonality. Interfacing here might create a third, more mobile position, saturated the event with the virtual as it be viewed as a vitality affect on a force, composing an indeterminacy within implicated machinic components in producing a felt moment of creative prescribed events of relation. each other’s becoming through an differing. Parasitic machinics produced not a ongoing process of variation and re- linear evolution of the work, but rather articulation. 3.3 Concretization and the enabled ‘processes of connectivity and But I want to suggest that the more virtual interpenetration...[and] the fostering of radical folding occurring in the I want to suggest that it was through specifically transversal connections’ interruption of Re:Positioning Fear these particular interfacings that the [34]. This parasitic action of interfacing through the re-commissioning of the machine of Re:Positioning Fear was an agent of difference in that it shadow making machine might be seen underwent a process of concretization. continued to re-express (transduce) as a fold of the outside. The ‘outside’ Processes of concretization shift relation. It kept the event always on the here is force in non-relation [38] (itself systems from a limited, linear or closed point of splitting and moving into a disruptive gap in the relational field), functioning towards self-regulation and multiple new forms, suspending it in that ‘eats into the interval and forces or sustenance, and, consequently, towards unfolding differentiation. Again, this is dismembers the internal’ [39]. This can a ‘solidarity of openness’ (that is, an not unusual within works such as this produce ‘trans-formation…to the increase in self-generative capacities) designed to accommodate interference. composing forces, [which] enter in to a [45]. Re:Positioning Fear shifted from a Perhaps what is notable here is the relation with the other forces which fairly linear production that was to a degree to which such disruptions have come from the outside’ [40]. The certain extent its externally instigated overtook the original structures. participants’ shadow-body play was an functioning, towards the self outside of the event (not a potential), organization of a new event that was 3.2 Folds - the vibration of the which was folded into emergent less reliant on the artist’s conception of incompossible relation, at the level of force as well as the event or on the original conceived form. By trans-forming forces shaping If parasitic action was in a sense a utility of the technical objects. That is, the event this folding transformed the continual performed splitting of the system moved from a more affects of the event, since affect is what relation, the interfacing that occurred in ‘abstract’ configuration, to a self- is experienced in the transduction of Re:Positioning Fear might also perhaps modulating model. The work’s force [41]. The new affective tonality be thought of as producing difference differential tension became an intrinsic that was folded into the event coursed through connecting, through incitation component in its production and through, transducing, infecting all the or a ‘dynamics of infection’ [35] that consequently its processes became more systems constructing the event. worked to prolong and complexify. That circular. That is, the machinic This outside, seen as the is, through a folding of technological components invented more co- ‘incompossible’ (that which was objects and bodies in interfacing dependant ways of interacting, and a excluded or divergent from the event something new was produced (art). As ‘recurrent causality’ evolved that is [42]), defined the limit of the event [43]. Murphie writes, this is a doubling that characteristic of concretization [46]. Re:Positioning Fear had limits defining technologies can perform [36], in this This individuation was shared between its concrescence both in the types of case the body becoming-with the lights, components, drawing them into performances it produced and the the façade becoming-with shadows, concrete machinic process through the potential from which it was drawn portraits becoming-with movement and evolution of a shared associated milieu. (various potential mutations of shadow so on. This folding, rather than Interfacing here might be seen to have playing with text, for example). The collapsing difference to produce a new incited a phase or register-shift through introduction of a whole new outside homogenous history or façade, transduction [47], implicating the tactic of production through connections produced through multiplication new external. That is, a complexity beyond between participants co-composing singularities that were performed simple intensive disruption occurred. relations together via the interfacing of alongside, throughout and in the gaps of While the machine’s modulations were their shadows then delimited the the previously existing iterations. driven by the compossible actions of the Re:Positioning Fear event. The tactic Folding could be seen here to be bio-technical interfacing, these radical initiated new performances and fields of powerful in both the creation of interfacings acted more significantly on potential to compose with, even as it actualized and potential foldings that the system. They were capable of continued to drive towards its the interfacing opened up; a bifurcating rearranging both how the potential previously instigated concrescence. In of future unfoldings that resonated combinations actualized and of creating redefining the limits and potential of the within the event. completely new milieus. More than event, this folding of the incompossible Interfacing here was a performative modulating transduction, a new machine was a more radically differential act. act by which the machine continued to was produced from the field when the Such folding was, again, a positive re-fold its internal systems. It was also a system passed a ‘threshold of generator of multiplicities of difference machinic action folding elements [qualitative] intensity’ [48], forcing new [44]. This difference was evident not outside itself into its workings, and flows, with their attendant particularly in a shift in the utility or these actions created, as Deleuze says, a individuations, to begin. materiality of the technical objects and ‘forced movement’ or ‘internal With such a shift the machine other components of the assemblage, developed new transductive potentials
between the internal and external (the technology in the work. Instead it 19. Munster [9] pp.13-14. field), a ‘charged grounding’ [49] of the engaged, as Stern proposes, ‘with the 20. Gilbert Simondon, ‘The genesis of the two. That is, the connection of internal quality and styles of movement’ that individual’, in Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter, spacing and external contrast in were performed [53], with the invention Eds., Incorporations (New York: Zone books, 1992) p.313. dynamic virtual relation created a larger of (new) styles, with the implicit, the machine ecology [50], a ‘conversation’ potential, to construct new ways of 21. Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to between them that gave new dynamism relating through interfacing. Immersion (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2003) p.198. to the event, another scale on which it was self-modulating. Not only the References and Notes 22. That is, it has shifted towards the pole of event, but also the field itself had 1. Michel Serres & Bruno Latour, Conversations concretization (becoming-concrete), rather than seeing the terms as absolute and exclusive. changed. Re:Positioning Fear had on science, culture and time. (Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press, 2011) p.70. 23. Andrew Murphie. [15] p.104. changed its nature, not just by actualizing a previously un-actualized 2. Brian Massumi, “Interface and active space: 24. Munster. [9] p.15. potential, but by rewriting the very field human machine design”, 6th international symposium on electronic art, Montreal, 1995 p.7. 25. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition. Paul of potential available to it, generating
Giles Deleuze, Cinema 2. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson less with signification than a collective 11. Katherine Hayle, cited Munster [9] pp. 62-3. becoming [51]. and Robert Galeta, 3rd ed. (Chippenham, Wiltshire: Continuum, 2005) p.28. This interfacing was performed, not, 12. Elizabeth Grosz, “A thousand tiny sexes; feminism and rhizomatics”, in Giles Deleuze and 34. Simon O'Sullivan, Art Encounters with one can say, ever entirely by either the the theatre of philosophy, Eds. Constantin Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond biological nor the technical systems V.Boundas & Dorothea Olkowski, 1994 pp.193-4. Representation (Hampshire and New York: making up the machine, but by the 13. Félix Guattari, "On Machines." Complexity 6 Palgrave McMillan, 2006) p.17. machinic action producing also the (1995) p.12. 35. Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: a potential ruptures and the uncertainty of 14. Brian Massumi, A user's guide to capitalism free and wild creation of concepts (Cambridge, an evolving dynamic virtual that was its and schizophrenia: deviations from Deleuze and Massachucetts & London: Harvard University fertility. Here the further potential of Guattari (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) p.192. Press, 2011) p.160. interfacing remained present even as it 15. Andrew Murphie, “Computers are not theatre: 36. Murphie [15] p.89. was enacted. It perhaps remained as a the machine in the ghost in Gilles Deleuze and 37. Deleuze [25] p.118. ‘lure’ towards feeling, as a pull towards Felix Guattari’s thought”, Convergence 2 (1996) p.80
Interfacing here was propositional of 17. Félix Guattari, “Machinic heterogenesis”, in 39. Deleuze [38] p.72. differentiation, attuning the conditions Verena Conley, Ed. Rethinking technologies for potential trans-force-form events; (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 40. Deleuze [38] p.73. 1993) p.35. Such machines are ‘about symbolic luring multiple transductive events into alliances and fusion…about viral or parasitic 41. Deleuze [38] p.60. being. The event, one might say, interdependence’. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: 42. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the answered Stern’s call for interactive art towards a materialist theory of becoming. (Cornwall: MPG Books, 2002) p.254. Baroque, Trans. by Tom Conley, (Minneapolis: to move away from privileging signs University of Minnesota Press, 1993) p.60. and images at the interface and the 18. Guattari [13] p.8. 43. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, demonstration or fetishization of the (New York: The free press, 1978) p.45.
44. Deleuze [25] p.267.
45. LaMarre, In Combes, [29] pp.92-3.
46. LaMarre, In Combes, [29] p.93.
47. Manning, Erin. Always More Than One: Individuation’s dance. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013) p.133.
48. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive science and virtual philosophy, (New York and London: Continuum, 2005) pp.18-19. This is a point of absolute origin of a new machine from the field producing new modes of transduction
49. LaMarre, In Combes, [29] p.93. As LaMarre says the internal and external grounds communicate ‘actively across their asymmetry, and have to stabilize that communication. The result is a self-regulating individual’. P.97.
50. See LaMarre for a discussion of the relation between the internal and external, in Combes [29].
51. Simon O'Sullivan, Art Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation. (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2006) pp.69-71.
52. Manning, [47] p.57.
53. Nathaniel Stern, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance, Canterbury: Gylphi limited, 2013) p.10.