mobilising deleuze

we think in images and sounds.
at DARE 2015, international conference,
ghent/belgium, nov 9–11; on Deleuze as
the dark precursor. – look HERE:

Adreis Echzehn, Elfie Miklautz:
Mobilising Deleuze – Thinking in Images and Sounds
To be presented at DARE 2015 – THE DARK PRECURSOR,
international conference on Deleuze and artistic research in Ghent/Belgium, nov 9–11, 2015.

Our presentation refers to the project „other spaces – knowledge through art“. Funded by FWF Austrian Science Fund, the project brought together artists and scientists with their various means of world approach. Oriented on Deleuzes’ notion that the process of becoming is essential in thinking about philosophy, art and science, the means at our disposal were those that artists and scientists utilize when writing, composing, staging, philosophizing, interpreting, inventing, informing, etc. The question of which aspects can be seen as common and/or different was not prematurely hypostasized with scientifically formulated theories, but was instead left open, thereby enlarging the realm of possibility for the unexpected or surprising.

The presentation shows the outcomes of a collaboration between conceptual art, cultural sociology and composition in the form of a video-audio-production named “al niente – a dissolution”. This Italian musical phrase literally says “to nothing”, meaning a diminuendo that fades until nothing is heard anymore – “a living silence” for makers Adreis Echzehn and Elfie Miklautz who in this way examine the phenomenology of hearing and time experiences in other spaces.

Their double-screen-video with an independent soundtrack of two collaborating composers follows a triple blind concept based on a compilation of music and sounds, videos, texts and photographs produced by the authors. The focus is upon finding spaces in which everyday temporal constructs are lifted, permitting a deceleration to be experienced. It is about the search for heterotopias in which silence becomes audible, about experiencing the atmosphere of a place through the sense of hearing, thus explorating and exhibiting correspondences between exterior spatial experiences with sound spaces and interior experience spaces.

What we want to discuss after showing the video is the cooperation between artists and a scientist working independently of each other to create a common result that goes beyond the differences, showing repetitions with minimal but substantial abberations and following different paths of transition. Our creation is, so to say, an example of answering the question raised in the call for the conference: “the question of how a communication between heterogenous systems, ‘of couplings and resonance’, occurs without being predetermined”.

We will show and talk about how we composed theses resonances and how we created “new couplings that are not accidental but rigorous and at the same time indeterminate”. The challenge for the scientist was working without any concepts and definitions e.g. of silence or nothingness, but instead experimenting with contemplating: trying to find the passage from affections and perceptions to affects and percepts in a Deleuzian sense with the aim to create a bloc of sensations standing for itself, untranslatable into words and assumptions. Contemplating in this way means becoming the percepted part of the world, having passed into it – “We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it … Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero.” (Deleuze/Guattari, What Is Philosophy, Columbia University Press 1994, p. 169)

Related videos/images and sounds at www.spaciergang.org

Length of presentation: 45 min (25 min video, 10 min speech, 10 min questions and answers)

Keywords: Practices of creating and researching, aesthetics, cooperation of art and science

Adreis Echzehn is a conceptual artist, author, filmmaker and photographer (see more on www.spaciergang.org)
mail: behindme [At] gmx.at

Elfie Miklautz is a professor of sociology at the WU Vienna University of Economics and works on the interface of art an science
mail: miklautz [At] wu.ac.at