An aesthetic and epistemological departure from ocular centrism has occurred in the wake of current technological evolutions and the posthuman turn. The sonic exploration of the more-than-human takes artists and philosophers beyond anthropomorphism to reveal the hidden patterning of life forms and yet-unfathomed universes. The conflation of nature with culture is one shift that takes place when thinking with sounds and rhythm and studying our environments. On an ontological level, a reordering of subject and object occurs when encountering the reciprocal (...) relationship of sounding. What if culture is actually nature? How does technology connect with botany, and what does it mean to engage the environment with the expanded tactility of the ear? This essay observes current inter-species practices in sound art by revisiting philosopher Susanne Langer’s theory of an embodied and embedded mind. Her “new key” in philosophy emphasizes music as a dynamic sound-pattern to conceptualize a semiology of artistic forms that renders human feeling in regard to non-human antecedents. This serves as a tool to trace the preconceptual substrata of mind, leading us through process-oriented studies of nature and psychophysical affect. Thinking with Langer involves the interconnection of natural systems, behavioural patterns, and human expression, which emerges in art. (shrink)

What do we hear in a human voice that vibrates through electrical flows? In this paper I argue for listening beyond the human in performances with audio media. I propose understanding such performance practice as engaging with what I call plasmatic voice, a phenomenon distinct from the merely additive, prosthetic conception of voice + electricity. Instead, plasmatic voice functions as instances of queer assemblage stretching to reach the radically Other that constitutes ourselves—facilitating the sense of what Alaimo terms transcorporeality, an (...) understanding of human embodiment as “intermeshed with the more-than-human world”. The vibrations of plasmatic voice—as an example of Eidsheim’s intermaterial vibrational practice—loosen human social constructs of race and gender and reverberate with nonhuman ecosystems, as I illustrate through analysis of musical examples. (shrink)

:How can a properly relational and anti-substantialist conception of masculinity be understood as belonging to the territorialising assemblage of the garage? Focusing on the relation between the suburban garage and masculinity, this article develops the concept of “opportunity” as part of a gendered passage of action. Two examples of the garage-assemblage are examined through their popular cultural myths. The first involves the example of disaffected working-class male youth working on cars as represented in the Australian film Metal Skin. The second (...) belongs to the “two-guys-in-a-garage start-up” allegory of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture in the popular narrative accounts of the Apple computer. These examples are used to explore how different cultural contexts can have a shared but differentially attuned sense of a techno-aesthetic appreciation of the relation between technology and masculine action. (shrink)

This paper will address some design concerns relating to philosopher Étienne Souriau’s work Les différents modes d’existence (2009). This has important bearings upon design because, first, this philosophical attitude thinks of designing not as an act of forming objects with identity and meaning, but rather as a process of delivering things that allow for a multiplicity of creative remodulation of our very existences. Secondly, Souriau unpicks the concept of a being existing as a unified identity and redefines existence as a (...) creative act of nonstop production of a variety of modes of existence. In doing this he not only moves ontological considerations to the fore of philosophical discussions away from epistemological ones, but does so in such a way as to align with attitudes to ethics that relate it to ontology – notably the work of Spinoza. (This places Souriau in a philosophical lineage that leads back, for example, to Nietzsche and Whitehead, and forward (from his era) to Deleuze and Guattari.) In thinking both ontology and ethics together, this paper will introduce a different approach to the ethics of design. (shrink)

Felix Guattari was a modernist. He not only liked a lot of modernist artists, but his ‘aesthetic paradigm’ found its generative diagram in modern art. The most important aspect of this diagram was its insistence on the production of the new, the way it produced a utopian projection of a ‘people to come’, and so a politics whose only horizon was the future. Also important for Guattari's diagram of the ‘modern’ were the forces of abstraction, autonomy and immanent critique. Together (...) these elements construct an artwork that is radically singular and separate, composed of a-signifying, a-temporal and invisible forces, sensations that go beyond our human conditions of possibility. In this Guattari's modernism must be understood as being quite different from his co-option by contemporary art theorists influenced by post-Operaist thought. Post-Operaism understands politics as ‘being-against’, a dialectical form of negation that finds its political condition of possibility in what already exists. Because such thought sees modern art as being entirely subsumed by the institutions and markets that contain it, art itself must be negated in order for aesthetic powers to become political. This has lead post-Operaist thought to align itself strongly with the avant-garde positions of institutional-critique and art-into-life, or ‘non-art’. Guattari's modernism takes him in a very different direction, affirming modern art despite its institutional enframing, because art is forever in the process of escaping itself. This makes modern art the model in Guattari's thought for politics itself. (shrink)

‘Beyond their instrumental functions,’ writes Rivka Oxman in an article about design, creativity and innovation, ‘advanced digital and computational environments are also becoming tools for thinking design’. At the leading edge of creativity and innovation design does not only speculate the plausible, possible or potential, but pragmatically inserts such futures into the present must). Using concepts mainly from Deleuze, Guattari, Spinoza and Simondon, I will position such design speculation as pragmatic, divergent, complex and emergent. That is, as manifesting the technical (...) mentalities that provide the milieu in which we can show what we ‘might be capable of’. (shrink)

This paper presents a discussion of the methodology, theory and key findings from an arts-based inquiry into academic learning environments entitled Cubic Reflections. The Cubic Reflections project involved a series of twelve site-specific cubes that were installed within the outdoor environments of a university campus in regional Australia. The cubes were designed to form a network of objects that reflected the aesthetic and ecological dimensions of the university’s learning environments. Students and staff were invited to both activate and build on (...) this network by mapping and reflecting on their own movements within and between the twelve installations. This paper firstly describes the methodology of immersive cartography, drawing on a range of cartographic theories and practices from contemporary art, philosophy and anthropology. Following this, the concept of the ‘cartographic network’ is developed through the work of Deleuze and Guattari and Latour in relation to the Cubic Reflections project. The methodology of immersive cartography is then analysed at the level of lived experience in terms of environmental aesthetics, drawing on the aesthetics of engagement and ambient poetics. Lastly, several artifacts from the Cubic Reflections project are discussed in relation to the methodology of immersive cartography and the concept of the cartographic network. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the ontologies of fragments of photography from a number of different, but colliding, perspectives. Beginning with the Romantic fragments of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, Lucretius’s atoms and the worms of Marx and Vonnegut. This seemingly random array of thoughts and thinkers concretises a multiplicity as a direct expression of the concepts put into play. With different ontological amalgams emerging from the range of multiples to hand, it becomes important to take account of not only of the complexity of (...) creativity at work, but also the apparently accidental events that are developed here. To investigate these concepts, this chapter turns to the philosophies of Simondon, Whitehead and Malabou. The impact of this upon photography generated at the confluence of human and nonhuman actors is examined in two areas. First, in the deliberate disruption of a phone camera app’s software, as shown in Bonamy Devas’s ‘Photo Tai Chi’ project. Second, in the unintended disruption of Jinkyun Ahn’s photos of his family, which were only partially recovered after being accidentally deleted. In concluding, this chapter seeks not to offer final, well-delineated, ontologically complete creations and to wonder in which ways can we ensure that any act of creation doesn’t completely exhaust its possibilities in its manifestation: this chapter included. (shrink)

Since the end of the 1980s – the Decade of Style – the value of style in design has fallen. Recent times see a focus on style as a sign of design’s immaturity, while a more mature design should be attending to process, strategy and policy creation. Design Thinking has been enjoying its success in the same spirit, where it is championed as a way of taking design away from its early stage as ‘mere’ styling, towards the more thoughtful, serious (...) matters of business. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is of a different mind however. ‘Style,’ he writes, ‘amounts to innovation.’ For us this engages not only a rethinking of design practice in particular, but also a reconsideration of the guiding principles of scenario planning. Deleuze’s thought entails the opportunity for styling to be an act that participates in driving all creativity towards making a successful future impact. A philosophical disruption of current design and scenarios orthodoxies offers a way of considering that style has a key role in the production of the future. Here, then, we will investigate the creative, even innovative, opportunities that emerge from a reworking of the value of style that comes from a critique of Design Thinking, a perspective on future-thinking, but also some work from organisation and management studies ), and an encounter with philosophy. We will highlight the affective capacities of style – in design and scenarios, both as creative constructing of futures – by way of creatively accessing uncertainty, complexity and indeterminacy in the production of strategic maps for living. (shrink)

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for (...) a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film – Leviathan – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being. (shrink)

This article focuses on what bodies know yet which cannot be expressed verbally. We started with a problem encountered during conventional interviewing in an ex-mining community in south Wales when some teen girls struggled to speak. This led us to focus on the body, corporeality and movement in improvisational dance workshops. By slowing down and speeding up video footage from the workshops, we notice movement patterns and speculate about how traces of gender body-movement practices developed within mining communities over time (...) become actualised in girls’ habitual movement repertoires. Inspired by the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Erin Manning, a series of cameos are presented: room dancing; the hold; the wiggle; the leap and the dance of the not-yet. We speculate about relations between the actual movements we could see, the in-act infused with the history of place, and the virtual potential of movement. (shrink)

Responding to Guattari’s call for a ‘mutation of mentality’, the article explores unconventional horse-assisted leadership learning as promising ways of embodied learning to be affected and response-able. By drawing on and continuing the work of Guattari and posthuman feminist scholars, we aim to show that studying the affective pedagogics of opening up the senses and learning to be affected is of vital importance. We analyse a posthuman auto-ethnography of developing capabilities to live and breathe together that allow us to relate (...) in alternative ways. Experiments with affective pedagogy are conducted as they affect bodies through indeterminate and liminal contact zones and use aesthetics to evoke transformation in senses and thoughts, care and response. Since they are both domesticated and non-human, horses are promising companions in this endeavour of entrainment. However, these sensorial experiments also call for an ethics of cutting connections and, not least, of permitting refusals of refusals. (shrink)

In this article, I analyse line-rendering techniques in drawing and choreography, based on a Deleuzian framework. This pragmatic approach for understanding affect emerges in three distinct formulations. The first engages the coincidence of drawing and choreography at the limit of reach; the second investigates how trace and movement generate different yet mutually resonant versions of semblance. The third framework considers the potential for improvisation in the irreconcilability of contour and surface in the weighted line. These three framings generate an experimental (...) milieu in which I articulate the co-emergence of thought and feeling in relation to relevant concepts of the body and affect. In activating affective intensity in different line-rendering operations, this analysis traces the way that affects help to modulate tendencies of moving, feeling and thinking over a series of operations. (shrink)

This exploratory paper investigates the enactment of a number of “publics” in relation to a recent, ostensibly “technical”, innovation, namely, the nanotechnology Vertically Aligned Nanotube Array-black. In particular, we show how various representations of VANTAblack—as technical artifact, as an exclusive artist’s material, as an exciting coating for a mass-produced commercial product, and as an object of science communication—implicate different “aesthetic experiences”. We discuss these aesthetic experiences in terms of the enactment of four distinct “aesthetic publics.” We then consider the possible (...) analytic value of the concept of aesthetic publics, not least in relation to the “opening up” and “closing down” of the potential debates that might attach to emerging technologies. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore the concept of rhythm as enabling relations and thus as an appropriate mode of analysis for digital sound art installation. In particular, the article argues for a rhythmanalysis of the sonic event as a ‘vibrating sensation’ (Deleuze and Guattari) that incorporates the virtual without necessarily actualizing it. Picking up on notions such as rhythm, time, affect, and event, particularly through their discussion in relation to Susanne Langer’s work, I argue for the consideration (...) of the sonic event as an instance of a different kind of temporality subsisting underneath clock-time and sense perception. Ultimately, and this is the position of this essay, an investigation into experimental projects that interweave digital, sound, and aesthetic dimensions enables the articulation of a rhythmic time that helps account for the unknown, indeterminate, and unintentional forces immanent to the sonic. (shrink)

This essay combines experiential writing, quotes from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves and Gilles Deleuze's philosophy in order to indicate that architecture remains a largely overlooked instance of the world. This is particularly problematic in the context of the question of immanence, which can be understood to lie at the core of Deleuze's philosophy. Architecture's relation to thought is discussed here via Deleuze's writing in Difference and Repetition and pursued in conjunction with Simone Brott's notion of architectural ‘effects’. Rather than (...) seeing encounters with architecture as the site of recognition of the habitual and routine, our experience of architecture-as-world should be understood to ceaselessly contribute to the emergence of thought. Brian Massumi's writing offers one potential direction to pursue, via the notion of the diagram tied to experience before it is fed into the loop of architectural design and its accompanying representational techniques. (shrink)