Zero degrees

"Zero degrees is the reference point where everything begins…
... and everything ends" (Akram Khan)

What is at play is ambivalence. Numeric quantities seem determinate but the infinite is brought into play because zero is simultaneously a benchmark and a transition in a series where opposites (beginnings/ endings) can meet. It signifies absence (or the arithmetical value of nothing which is not the same as a lack) but marks this with a presence, the 0 symbol itself. Does 0 designate a third space? Is it surrounded by emptiness? Flows? The piece is a formal and narrative exploration of the politics of border spaces as a metaphor for the transient nature of diasporic identity. In the programme notes, Khan explains that 'zero degrees' symbolises the rite of passage between life and death, belonging and non-belonging and most importantly identity and the lack of.

"We are functioning in a world fundamentally characterised by objects in motion. These…include ideas and ideologies, peoples and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques. This is a world of flows." (Appadurai, 2001)

Know-how and No-How

Notes from: Know-how and No-How: stopgap notes on “method” in visual art as knowledge production by Sarat Maharaj (published in Art and Research, spring 2009)

“Visual Art as Knowledge Production” involves sundry epistemic engines and contraptions that we might broadly refer to as “Thinking Through the Visual”. What do such modes of knowing entail? Perhaps method is less about given, handed-down procedures than about approaches that have to be thrashed out, forged again and again on the spot, impromptu in the course of the art practice-research effort. Perhaps method is not so much readymade and received as “knocked together for the nonce” - something that has to be invented each time with each research endeavour.

Deleuze came to explore the sense of an unfolding flux between the “poles” in all its phases and variability through the notion of “any space whatever” - drawing on a series of examples from film. In his critique, “any space whatever” takes on the force of method: it embodies the concept of “singularity” that cuts across the poles of the universal and particular dissolving them. This notion seems to lie with Ferdinand Gonseth who had tussled with the “any space whatever” in mathematics, with rules that undergo change, with process and contingency. In the framework of a non-Aristotelian logic, Bachelard uses the term for an alternative tack to the Kantian principle of the “universal” - to bridge the gap between thinking.

It is not only about thinking by means of the visual, via its sticky thick as it were. It is about unpacking it, taking apart its components, scouring its operations. What I am trying to finger eventuates not so much in the well-trodden terrain of the academic disciplines or in the so-called gaps, chinks and cracks between them or in any designated “interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary” belt. Rather it is a force in its own right, always incipient in “whatever” spaces where intimations of unknown elements, thinking probes, spasms of non-knowledge emerge and come into play. It is distinct from the circuits of know-how. It is the rather unpredictable surge and ebb of potentialities and propensities - the flux of no-how. The term is Samuel Beckett’s. No-how embodies indeterminacy, an “any space whatever” that brews up, spreads, inspissates.

If the research project was... #1

If the research project was a play, it would look at the modes of suspension by questioning the notions of overlay, synchronicity and the time in-between. The play would be in three parts. In the first part, the action is set ahead of the screened subtitles; in the second part these would be in sync, while in the third part titles would reveal what was about to happen on the stage. Subtitles would be the exact wording of the play, building up tension towards the third part. The stage would be screened off from the audience by a lightly reflective translucent net. The screen is used for projecting the titles, but it also creates a border between the actors and viewers. During the play one can never directly engage with the other. In that sense, the act is double-removed - in space, and in time...

The content of the play until now remains a question...

Out-of-Sync (exhibitions)

Laurie Anderson: "I usually watch TV in a rocking chair, and I have noticed as the chair moves, the image bends at the edges. A good solution is to put the TV in another rocking chair that is in sync, so that the image stabilises." A video composed for 2 violins that go in and out of phase, 1970s

The Globe shrinks (2010). A multi-channel video installation by Barbara Kruger that incorporates written and spoken text in an exploration of how we express and communicate, but also confront ourselves. Composed of 4 screens, each on the facing wall, the installation places the viewer in the middle of the storyline. The installation space becomes disturbingly intimate as one never knows which screen is turned on next. Thus the visitor finds itself in the middle of the conversation trying to face the person speaking, but ends up turning itself from right to left to back to front, unable to grasp the setting, and losing any control over the event and space. The seating for the audience is placed in-between the screens. Even though one might try to walk to the corner of the room to get a better view, it turns out to be unachievable.

Recapitulation

... reading Deleuze Cinema II

Quasi-emotion theory

Quasi-emotions differ from their actual counterparts both in their source (they are generated by beliefs about what is fictionally rather than actually true), and, typically, in their behavioral consequences. Views in the second subgroup maintain that when we engage with fiction, our emotional responses are directed not towards the characters or events within the imaginary context, but rather towards appropriate real-world surrogates for or counterparts of those characters and events. So, for example, we don't feel sadness for Romeo and Juliet, but rather for people in the actual world who have led relevantly similar lives. (Charlton 1984)

A second family of response rejects the Belief Condition, denying that the situations and characters to which subjects have emotional responses are situations and characters that they believe to be fictional or merely imaginary. Advocates of such confusionist or illusionist or belief-suspension views maintain that when we engage emotionally with fictional characters and situations, we temporarily cease to represent them as imaginary, instead representing them (as the result of some confusion, or an illusion, or a ‘suspension of disbelief’) to be real and mind-independent. Such views have few adherents among contemporary philosophers and are generally discussed only to be subsequently dismissed.

Giardini: A Fairytale

A visually sumptuous film of thirty minutes, Giardini comprises two projections set side-by-side, which steadily gather a series of evocative vignettes. Like McQueen’s past films, such as Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep (2002) and Gravesend (2007), Giardini denies clear links between representation and significance, between form and content – not to exclude reference but instead to allow the image’s potential meanings to crystallize, its facets reflecting numerous paths of fabulation.

Indeed, the film’s suspension of its images in a field of multiple possibilities defines its power: to release life from belonging to any certain code, clear narrative, or restrictive regimen, and to do so in the quintessential location of national order: the Giardini of the Venice Biennale. As its title indicates, the film is set in the famous exhibition grounds. These otherwise well-known monuments are shown here in an unexpected light, during the interim between biennales, in the down-time and during the nights, in the shadows of spectacle. The renowned gardens are thereby recast as a site where everything is suddenly up for grabs, seems unfamiliar and unpredictable, where life is shown to assume forms of creative survival that transcend the fanfare of the great exhibition. Giardini constructs a fictional world and does so with great care, although its stories are not necessarily impossible accounts of what might actually happen.

Multiverses

Parallel universes, also known as meta-universes or multiverses, are a group of theoretical twin universes that coexist at the same time as our own. Parallel universes are said to be simple variations of our reality, all running at the same time in different realities. Parallel universes are not uniquely confined to the science fiction realm anymore; philosophy, physics and even theology have theories about why multiverses exist and how they work. Parallel universes have often been used in fiction and TV programs as an explanation for strange phenomena. Quantum mechanics the science that looks for explanations to phenomena that cannot be explained by the regular laws of physics and science, has been studying parallel universes since 1956. American physicist Hugh Everett first formulated the idea of parallel universes to explain the theory that every possible outcome of every choice we have actually does happen. While in this universe you may choose path A, an alternate you will choose path B in a parallel universe. Where and how parallel universes exist is actually the most heated source of debate. Some say meta-universes exist close to us. So close, in fact, that ghosts may be nothing more than people from alternate universes somehow slipping into our reality. Others postulate that parallel universes are infinitely far, way beyond the farthest galaxies. A third theory is that parallel universes exist in different dimensions, either lower or higher than the four-dimension world we live in.

The liminal

Liminality, as developed by van Gennep (1960), refers to "in-between situations and conditions that are characterised by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty regarding the continuity of tradition and future outcomes". The word liminal is derived from Latin "limen" (threshold), and simply means a situation in which, in order to facilitate a "passing through", ritually or temporarily, all limits are removed. As a consequence, the very structure of society is temporarily suspended. The primary meaning however is not simply a passage, but successful completion of a passage. It assumes particular ordering in which someone goes ahead, showing the way so that others could follow, "imitating" him.

Although the liminality concept was initially developed as a means to analyse the middle stage in ritual passage, it can be seen as events or situations that involve in dissolution of order but which are also formative of institutions and structures. But liminality is also a situation where almost anything can happen. This is why, in a rite, such openness is limited: any rite must follow a strictly prescribed sequence, where everybody knows what to do and how; and second, everything is done under the authority of a master of ceremonies. (Turner, 1967) Liminal is a moment, however brief, when the past is momentarily suspended and the future has not yet begun.

Liminal situations can be applied to whole societies going through crisis or a collapse of order. But a liminal state may also become fixed; referring to a situation in which the suspended character of social life takes on a more permanent character (Turner, 1967). Szakolczai defines three types of permanent liminality: monasticism (with monks endlessly preparing the separation), court society (with individuals continuously performing their roles in an endless ceremonial game), and Bolshevism (as exemplifying a society stuck in the final stage of ritual passage). He argues that not only the emergence but also the maintenance of the communist regime was only possible under such liminal conditions. The communism as a regime was based on the perpetuation of temporary liminal conditions into a permanent state, and it was only possible if the political system kept the society in a permanent state of liminality and transitions: of confusion, threat and uncertainty. The liminal is the temporary suspension of order. In that state there is no concreteness. Therefore objectivity becomes impossible; without concreteness, matter, resistance to set limits is absent and therefore necessary development of control and responsibility is missing.