The conference opened with a keynote by Brian Massumi who, as we know, tied in a fine mesh of aesthetic considerations through the lens of pure experience and radical empiricism. Wonderfully presented and even so wonderfully contextualized by a long comment from Marie-Luise Angerer. The second day was scheduled for the Motion Lab Panel convened by Scott deLahunta. It was very interesting to see the different works of Scott, Nathaniel Stern, who’s work I really fell in love with, Erin Manning together with Norah Zuniga Shaw and Chris Ziegler. Despite the circumstance that the two evening performances were overbooked and hard to get in, I really enjoyed the Synchronous Objects installation by Norah in relation to her longterm work with William Forsythe.

Sunday reminded me an Odyssey  trying to reach Marl with commuter trains on a day without commuters to see the exhibition for the German Sound Art Awards 2010. The exhibition was not very exciting but to have seen a conceptually built city complex with wonderful attempts of concrete ornamentation made it worth the journey. In general, the commuting between the different conference sites was a bit a of pain, if one didn’t change hotels. The evening of that Sunday though was quite amazing. At the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen the conference co-organized the Day of Sound with fabulous electro-acoustic pieces and a concert space that made you shiver with its stunning acoustic quality. Highlight, certainly, was the performance with the Max Brand Synthesizer in a piece faithfully called Hell Machine.

On Monday the conference took its proper format meaning too many parallel panels in often too small rooms. Since I had to leave after the second day of the conference, I will only comment on two things. First, The Digital Aesthetics of Climate Change panel, organized by a group of befriended scholars from Aarhus University in Denmark and successfully turned into an “Un-Panel” by The People Speak from London. Thematically and in its expression the panel raised a vital discussion that didn’t leave the impression of flaky and fuzzy climate-talk but a profound an continuous critical inquiry fueled by contributions from outside the room posted and projected on a screen. The People Speak moderated the panel friendly and to the pint which turned it into a refreshing format, especially at 10 a.m. in the morning. The second panel, was the one in which Jonas Fritsch and I presented our reflections on our experiences from Society of Molecules in May 2009 in Montréal. We were surprised about the number of people that crammed into the room for a panel on Urban Interventions. The unfortunate part of our panel was the rather loose time-keeping which resulted in no time for discussions and a focus on one particular, rather uninspiring presentation (no names of course). Apparently, our title “Balloons, Sweat and Technologies - Urban Interventions through Ephemeral Architectures” raised interest trough the very notion of Ephemeral Architectures. Not having thought of it properly, I was asked if our installation was called ephemeral architectures or if we regarded the entire event as ephemeral architectures. A very interesting question for which I would like to thank Katrin Rickerts a lot. At another point in time I will come back to these considerations.

Impressive were the TURST exhibition with very high quality works and the performance by Ei Wada and his Braun Tube Jazz Band. In general one could recognize a shift in digital aesthetics away from a data-centred and often pseudo technological or scientific attitude (except the work of Carsten Nicolai of course) toward a thorough media practice that carefully examines its needs to trigger certain modes of expression. Ai Wada took the notion of the signal to its core and blew the gallery apart with his performance. Here is another set, but you get the impression.

I enjoyed very much the work of Seiko Mikami entitled “Desire of Codes.” The work consists of an entire wall of motorized webcams that trace you. The captured images get projected on a screen where they are remixed with other video material mined from the Internet. Aesthetically and conceptually a very strong work. Another project that caught my attention was Ariel Guzik’s work “Nereida.” Nereida is an underwater capsule that contains musical instruments to establish contact with cetaceans. What impressed me the most was the serious engagement concerning potential means of communication with other species by aesthetic means. For me this is a very beautiful and strong work in the field of research-creation.

I would like to close with a short but definitively worth wile experience of wearing the McGhillie suit provided through an intervention/performance organized by my colleagues in Zurich Knowbotic Research. McGhillie is an un-person, a Batleby-like figure who evades classification and social or physical order. Neither a person nor a mere object but rather a thing with all its potentials and qualities. A Becomnig-McGhillie means to stop thinking and feeling like an individual ant to melt with your environment. Becoming-McGhillie makes you enter the field of the void that is never the void but an in-between filled with new potential. McGhillie is a thing of the interstice, between different modes of being, between different forms of life. Becoming-McGhillie for only 20 minutes allowed me to enter the interstitial field between being and non-being, not only by means of perception (perceiving and being perceived) but by means of affect that allow different milieus to constitute with and without McGhillie. A definitive must if one seeks for modes of pure experience!

Here is a quick homage to the fantastic “Event, Signal, Affect” conference at Aarhus University I was invited to last week.  The conference was targeted to bring together selected scholars working on affect, theories of the event, non-representational theory and signal or the signaletic. The setting was very intimate, with 25 people and a perfectly organized structure, including dinner and collective cookout.

The main guests were Erin Manning and Brian Massumi and Nigel Thrift, who unfortunately never made it to the conference. Topics were widely spread but well orchestrated into focused panels. The intellectual debate was engaged and on a mutually interested and curious level. On top of the two fantastic interventions by Manning and Massumi and the very focused crowed of guests, I would like to foreground the environment and techniques that made the conference so unique.

We started off with a round of conceptual speed-dating, a technique to get to know each other and have an idea of the other one’s thinking-space. The concept was autonomy and the range of discussions was wide. The good thing about this technique is that you get an immediate impression of the other one’s personal work and his/her way to move in thought. Another good aspect was to seek for 10 minute presentations and have more time for discussions. In the cases where the time was kept, discussions were very vital. The dinner and especially the collective barbecue gave the conference a very different tonality from other conferences. A free day in between the two conference days added more quality time to relax and meet up and talk. All in all I really had the feeling I have been in touch with people that also don’t want to have large conferences and impersonal panels anymore.

This brings me to a very crucial point about such events. What one seeks in such events might be to network and put yourself in contact with the “right” people. But what actually really counts is the potential of a joyous being together and friendship. In that respect it would be interesting to ask, how do you generate environments that do not allow any straight forward modes of self-representation and networking but are lures for friendship? In that sense I have to say that the potential for friendship to build is way higher in such events. I feel that I had the chance to intellectually relate to my friends Tomas Jellis and Jonas Fritsch more intensively. It is the real joy of the time and ideas shared that need to be accounted for a creative practice such as our intellectual work. Further I finally had the chance to meet Thomas Markussen, also member of the Senselab and associate professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture. Two very lucky meetings that I didn’t anticipate before were Niels Albertsen head of the Department of Landscape and Urbanism and Leila Dawney, PhD researcher at the Geography Department in Exeter. Another wonderful aspect were politically engaged talks by Thomas Markussen on the Cut Up Collective and Tatiana Bazzichelli’s presentation on Italian Hacktivism and the media event of Anna Adamolo.

I would like to close this entry by pointing out the the level of openness of the discussion we enjoyed. Merete Carlson, PhD scholar from Copenhagen, gave the last presentation pointing out the difficulty to affectively engage with interactive media artworks by writing a PhD thesis about it. The problem is not, that one is not capable of writing a thesis according to known norms but rather how to write a thesis as process and in a way that accounts for the movement of thought without representing it in language. For me such highly difficult questions lie at the core of what research-creation might mean and how we have to move “earth and the heavens,” as Bruno Latour says, to allow new minor modes of research and creative practices to flourish.

A PhD project in its research and content often touches upon topics of critical importance and ethical encounters. The research we deploy bears a plethora of political and ethical decision we make and are confronted with. This immediate layer of a politico-ethical encounter in the practice of research is reflected onto the modes of creating and composing the content of our papers, presentations, shows, performances, and finally the PhD thesis. What critical considerations of the politics embedded in research might foreground are new practices and techniques of dealing with such issues beyond the well-considered modes of representation. Maybe through an awareness of the multifaceted politics in research we can re-invent modes of creating content and expression.

On January 7, 2010 we launched the first general meeting after phase one of the “nouveau terrain d’apparition” (NTA) project has been accomplished. The first phase focused on establishing a solid and properly working system to run the panoscope in a networked state, allowing telepresence between two characters in a shared and immersive virtual space. The general meeting targeted at a presentation of the technical system (mostly developed by Mike Woznieski), a demo of the system and theoretical reflections on the potentials of the system from my side. Guest at the event were students from Université Laval in the the Museology Department and members of the Institut Technologies de l’information et Sociétés, Bob White from the Anthropology Department at Université de Montréal, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi and of course head researcher Luc Courchesne.

I will here focus on some potential alleys and first insights from the conversations. My presentation was targeted at opening the NTA-system’s black box (à la Bruno Latour) and to outline its actants and interdependencies. The importance for the first phase lies in the system or rather assemblage that has been developed. As Luc pointed out the other day, the system is at its limits in terms of computation and therefore we will have to take its state as “enabling constraint.” The first important move which occurred consists in going beyond the conceptualization of such a system as dispositif and to use the notion of the assemblage instead. This shift in terminology brings us close to think different registers of realities (those realities of matter included) together and to annihilate any kind of other-worldly conception of virtual reality. To unfold this move I was drawing on Andrew Murphie’s article “Putting the Virtual back into VR.” Here Murphie claims with a Deleuzian approach through “The Fold” that Virtual Reality as a concept can help us to understand and play with what Deleuze defines as the virtual, the continuous immanence of potential in each actualization.  Since assemblages of virtual reality provide the potential to narrow the usually very crowded (with percepts and affects) experiences in our general “Umwelt” (von Uexküll), we can more precisely tap into the field of the potential. What we encounter as assemblage exists on the one hand as a complex intertwining of different realities - material, human, social, spatial and computational -  and on the other hand as a narrowing of our sensory focus to experiment with the virtual relay in our experiences.

In resonance with the system’s actual state these considerations take specific configurations:

• Space-time: In an immersed experiential space such as the panoscope the narrowing aspect of VR allows us to experiment with new experiences of space-time. Important for a successful design of such different experiences seems to me an appropriation of affective interaction design (as developed by Jonas Fritsch). As Fritsch outlines: the account of affect will have to ”…directly address forms of experience, forms of life, on a qualitative register” (Fritsch 2009). “Affect as a whole then is the virtual co-presence of potentials” (ibid.)
• Affect & Interaction + Memory: To feel these co-presences of affective potentials the system might not only offer shared spaces for experience but also allow the potential for interaction. This point has been uttered by Massumi and Manning, as well as in my presentation and by Mike Wozinieski. The potential to actively contribute to the system seems crucial for an enhanced interactive immersive experience. This circumstance has two important values: On the one hand the experience of space-time is always related to the way memory occurs in Bergson and slightly different in Whitehead. Memory here functions as the potential side of an actualization in a new experience. Obviously, the human participant always carries potentialities into the system through memories. Such a form of memory adds a singular (yet potentially always collective) aspect to each experience with the system. Hence, an important consideration would be the generation of memory with the system. Not only through giving machine perception the potential for interaction but also to generate an affective moreness of computing other than traditional approaches of “affective computing” as emotional aspects of programming. For the future I will follow up this thought under the concept of “affective and perceptive traces.”
• Time and Duration: Another form of space-time configuration that might be enhanced through interactive modes of contributing actively to the system would be jumps, leaps and the sensation of duration through the system. At the moment the space inside the panoscope consists of spheres (360° images), time-lines with images that relate to certain biographies, spatial city environments (e.g. Toronto), and animated spheres with moving sound and image. Since experience here is spatialized and therefore according to Bergson misses in its euclidian appearance a thorough attribute of duration (durée), the durational aspect need to be generated by particular strategies. One of these strategies has been mentioned by Erin Manning as boredom. For her, a new user of the system has to arrive at a point of boredom to become creative with the system. To allow this creativity, we need the experience a certain durational quality inside the panoscope and the potential of active participation and contribution.
• Collective Experience: The final point touches upon the collective experiences the system might allow. On the one hand collective experience occurs through the potential telepresence with other users. On the other hand experience surfaces through the contribution to the system and the creation of traces that can be encountered by others. What seems important here is the experience of a fully embodied state in the immersive environment of the panoscope. The embodied quality of experience allows us to embrace multiple (crossmodal) perceptive modes. On the one hand one can share experience through telepresence. On the other hand (which has been suggested by Erin Manning) one can also have the same collective experience with more than one person inside one panoscope. There is a difference in the shared expereince either through telepresence or through the physical sharing of the space in a panoscope. Interesting in that regard world be a blending of collective experience that not only includes human participants in actual physical or tele- presence but also the contribution to this experience by the flow of memories and contributions to the experience by an active and interactive (responsive) system. In that sense, to provide an initial idea, the collective individuations that might be facilitated through the system, could be generated through an internal resonance of the system with its users. To conclude with Simondon: “Internal resonance is the most primitive form of communication between realitities of different orders. It is composed of a double process of amplification and condensation.” Amplification here defines the process of an individuation (of a system for instance) as a resolution of anterior tensed states. Its condensation is the very presence as event that ties together all its anterior disparate realities and tendencies. A nexus with social character in Whitehead. The internal resonance of the user-panoscope individuation expresses its amplification and condensation through the emergent relation between different realities (of users, memories and the systems active contribution) and its condensation in an actual occasion (an event in all its complexity and singularity).

After a long stretch from Cardiff back to London and then to Zurich, I am finally able to post a couple of reflections on the Deleuze and Activism Conference in Cardiff. I will here focus on a couple of common remarkable points that could be sensed throughout the event.

In first place the issue of “Deleuze” - “and” - “Activism”: Fortunately and finally precise and creative critique has been uttered concerning the rather dominant refrain of a branding of “Deleuze and …” enterprises. No surprise with the conference’s setting at Cardiff and its filed of Deleuze and-ianisms this might have been the last event termed in that fashion. Nevertheless other participants, respectively Keir Milburn from the University of Leeds, and I amongst many in the audience felt the problematic and discomfort of the framing of conferences through an “and” that creates a binary relation without respecting the eternal “and” prominently proposed by Deleuze and Guattari in their opening chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. From my perspective this has been less framed in a terminological problematic and rather opened the question of enabling constraints for thought to generate a creative problematic plane. In that sense one could feel that discourse has not been challenged in terms of radical thought but rather a rehearsal of established modes of thought. Without deploying a general critique and neglecting the fine nuances uttered by some very inspiring presentations, I would like to emphasize the slow mobility when it comes to rigorously creative and at the same time precise modes of thought. To base discussions on historical convergences between Deleuze and his peers or interpretations by successors, or to draw the discussion into a Badiouian or Hardt and Negri field seems less creative than one might expect.

The second issue of a conference on activism without an act-ivism: This was for me one of the most irritating experiences of the event. A continuous “drive” (and indeed it seems appropriate to not use desire here!) towards excuses of not doing real activism but only talking … I would suggest thinking might have happened once in a while as well. The issue here at stake was to feel uncomfortable if not ashamed of being academics or justifying oneself in such a situation. The more than a century long convergences between theory and practice to their very abandonment of the two explicitly in the philosophy of Nietzsche, Wiliam James, Alfred North Whitehead and Gilbert Simondon seemed to be evicted at various moments of the conference. This has to do for me with the “and”-construction of an event, where a name becomes the place-holder for “philosophy” (proper) and the addendum of activism its other pole. What seemed to happen throughout this series of self-accusation or excuses was the reinforcement of these two terms and their epistemes and ontologies without focusing on the continuum of which these two poles might be part of. In other words, an ontogentic mode of thought would have been helpful to foreground the field of emergences that make such a field of thought between Deleuze and Activism possible. In that sense, “A Thought” as an “act” (and certainly an act as a thought) could be regarded as a milieu for emergencies around a particular mode of thought and practice (that of Deleuze and his field) and another field of thought and practice related to activism - A thought is an act and an act is a thought, both being part of the complex micro-events of emergency as expression and their micropolitical forces.  Without depriving each of these fields from their very own ontologies, an ontogenetic operation could actually facilitate other fields of emergency that are vital enough to sustain a critique by proposing a different problematic, that of separated poles and the actual continuum that provides the plane of emergency for such poles to be potentially actualized. In such a manner the considerations of research-creation where the hyphen emphasizes a continuum of sets of practices across domains and where fields of emergence are the experimental ground seem to me one of the promising avenues for an ontogenetic operation that deals creatively with proclamations of blocks such as philosophy and activism.

Finally the very insightful demonstration of various processes and practices: This was the delightful part apart from also meeting very interesting people whom I have been friends with or heard about a lot. The various insights into Israeli micropolitics of interventions in the Israeli settlement politics by Ronnen Ben-Arie, the creative paper on Dandyism by Laurent de Sutter, or the presentation on the Radical Education Collective by Gašper Kralj and Bojana Piškur offered interesting and engaged approaches across domains. Not only appeared it that practices are able to foster a vital thought but also that a mode of thought can team up with practices when they collide in a creative way. In that sense I wished that conceptual papers would emerge more often from a serious self-understanding as practice and as an act at the very moment, a presentation as part of a series of events, a re-folding of experiences that are the ground for a conceptual trajectory.

Another aspect that surfaced in light of different practices and their contexts, was the very thought and practice that has to feed into creating an event. Such a circumstance has less to do with names and designated research fields but more with the formats we seek and the potential opening of a co-creative process. It seems to me that a small and intense setting as it was the case, works quite well. But at the same time I had the impression of being restricted through modes of organization and overarching formalism as academics/researchers of all fields with an interest in activism. From that angle I am convinced that the framing of an event is as important as the different people and ideas that come together. A board-room with pompous paintings of deans and a conference that doesn’t get in touch with the organizing institution and its students are two of many factors that have an impact on how such an event turns out. To understand a conference (in itself a critical term) as an ethico-aesthetic and aesthetico-political event across transversal registers of creative movement might propose another trajectory that could help to make the co-creative “acts” of such an event being felt.

The Interdisciplinary Dialogues 2009/10 series I am organizing in the PhD in Humanities at Concordia Universty, took place for the first time this term with the opening session entitled “Art as Research.” The overall theme for this year focuses on the question of “What is Research?” As part of the annually curriculum the PhD in Humanities is having the Interdisciplinary Dialogues as a platform for PhD students in the program to share ideas with their peers and faculty and to get their work discussed in light of particular topics.

The emphasis of the conceptual framework lies in the notion of “dialogues.” From last year’s experience and due to a general discomfort with terms like panel or paper presentations, this year’s series aims at creating an environment of mutual exchange of ideas in relation to a specific theme. Thus, the PhD students were asked to give 10 minute insights into their work in conjunction with the session’s theme. Once the presentations are over, a discussion with the audience is generated by a faculty member. In our case Owen Chapman from Concordia’s Communication Department took on the role of the discussant.

What follows are some remarks that are based on the experience of this first panel and the experiment it comprised. The presentations were all exercised in perfect idiosyncratic and thoughtful ways. I think the audience received insights into five very different projects that have very different angles around the problematic field of art as research. From preceding discussions the presenters knew each other which turned out to be very beneficial for the session as such. Hence, the challenge of proposing a problematic field instead of a bold statement or a mere provocation played not really in favour of the creative collaboration I envisioned for the session. Once the floor was opened for the audience, people (in reference to one individual in the audience that unfolded the problematic in a more than determinstic mode of thought [à la art vs. science vs. philosophy]) often fell back in defending academic disciplines, their value for dialogues, and their strengths in adressing the issue of art as research.

During the course of the discussion it turned out that the setting of an interesting theme, great presentations, and a discussant, are not necessarily enough, if it is not possible to divert deterministic lines of thought in favour of more productive forces. The techniques at stake need to be more refined without cutting the proces of actual collaborative thought. Hence, and this is the curicial question here, what is needed for a collective thought to emerge? I actually think, that the potential for such a collective process was immanently present but did not actualize due to particular circumstances. This is in its core a very political problem. On the one hand, we have to warrant a certain openness for a process to freely develop in its unpredictability. On the other hand we need a political commitment that is able to cut creatively and therefore to generate new openings. The political act resides not in the selective mode of amplification of a preferred line over others (always the problem of a positioning such as “right” or “left”). On the contrary, the political act here lies in the very attentiveness towards a process that need to be maintained open for new modes of collective expression. In other words, not a strategy or tactic that provides a direction but a continuous critical re-posing of the problematic at stake and its creative productivity.

Once the session was in a certain mode oriented (or territorialized), the refrain, with which the territory appears, became so strong that it disabled any re-emergence of a creative collective process. Participants fell back into straight-forward and short-handed exercises of rehearsing the jargon of their accustomed and inscribed disciplinary modes of thought. What would have been necessary was a little cut to open up another line and therefore a new field of potentials. In that sense a discussant can take on such a job, an audience member as well or one of the presenters (ideally we might want to get to a point where these differentiations are somewhat obsolete). The question refers for me to a lack of intensity and resonance. Certainly a molar resonance developed according to a strong refrain - the deterministic statement according to molar blocks of thought. But there was another resonance immanent yet not activated. The discussion that the presenting students generated in the meetings before bore plenty of potential for a collective mode of thought. A group-intensity, a comfort and ground to work from were the immanent forces that could have been activated to generate a new shift towards a processual opening.

We have two more chances to experiment in the coming sessions. Let’s hope things get more often cut productively than they did this time.

Such inspiring activities call for several questions regarding resistance and potentials for interventions and strategic occupation of space. It seems like the negotiation of a spatial environment receives a wider interest through its presence than other less material and less tangible forms of protest. The size plays an important role but also the pressing issue of a lack of space in the city and the desire for liveable and affordable districts with a rich cultural atmosphere. The collective initiative depends heavily on the factor of spaciality and the distribution of matters of interest in the spaces. In an environment of a a major city and the despair of creative cultures that move to Berlin and other countries, Hamburg has the chance to convert a site into something productive in an ethico-aesthetic manner. In other words, the groups that form a collective seek paths for enunciation that operate on margins between a molar issue and its appropriation.

The delicacy of dealing with large-scale sell-outs of space to corporate money reveals its problematic in a double-folded situation. In the molar capture of a capitalist purpose either option, a sell-out or a culturally diverse and sustainable renovation of the district, offers little room for a difference in terms of a creative climate beyond capitalist appropriation. Being marketable will always remain the general purpose if larger investments are at stake. On the other hand the creative force of adaptation seems to be transversally present throughout different notes of critical response to the lack of space, culture or support. One of the major fields of investment should be the creation of collective enunciations that address the issues of molar capture at many levels and through different strata. A rather topological generation of regions with sets of creative practices and their forces. In such a way the predominance of space seems persistent when it comes to a wider recognition of a problematic field. Such a spatial point of entry therefore has to be adapted and extended by its durational nature, its transversal practices and topological unfolding. It sometimes seems to be more reasonable to negotiate a minimal support and therefore a maximum of autonomy. If the city council involves in a remodelling project of the sight it might be advisable to create autonomous formats of a cooperative, with more self-organization and little reliability on the financial situation of the city.

In a deleuzoguatarrian manner I regard the second video, of a flashmob that creates noise, as a cut into the rhythm of solidified space, creating its own rhythm and connecting new milieu’s. Such practices might be a sign for a resistance and practices to come. The foundation of the molar deployment of reason fundamentally disintegrates in light of transversally powerful (meaning creative) rhythms that offer new collective modes of enunciation.

This is a short review on Lozano-Hemmer’s and Brian Massumi’s (in collaboration with Isabella Rossellini) work in progress “Levels of Nothingness” shown at the Guggenheim New York:

The Guggenheim’s Works in Progress series issuing its 25th anniversary this year, invited Lozano-Hemmer to present one of his works in progress. Levels of Nothingness is a synaesthetic performance of written, oral and visual dimensions. In collaboration with the actress Isabella Rossellini and the philosopher Brian Massumi Lozano-Hemmer and his team developed a voice-tracking system that responds to words in the form of lighting events. Attempting to create a relational model between the dimensions of thought in motion and audio-visual experiences the performance consisted of a 30 minute reading of philosophical quotes revolving around colour and perception clustered in conceptual blocks such as “emergence,” “singularity,” “body” or “transition.” Massumi’s philosophical influence in his work on colour and perception has been complemented by Rossellini’s beautiful voice and the “light dance” of more than 50 rock-and-roll concert lights.

The sensation that such an event generates is difficult to circumscribe in a classical manner such as light performance or interactive performance. What actually happened was a relational field of perception throughout the entire room. The perception of the visitor became amodal in its mode. In other words, one was immersed in light, a screen to read the quote that was aurally transmitted by Rossellini’s voice and enclosed in a slightly hazy room with the background noise of the lights moving and other bodies trying to capture the light at the ceiling. The human perception became amodal while the machine perception had its full attention focused on the voice and flow of words in their sonorities. The performance system for interaction became the perceiving entity as we (traditionally) expect the human sensory-motor system to work whereas the human perception was forced to reveal the amodality that perception is based on - synaesthesia as the point of entry for any perception to become noticeable and not as a strange abnormality of some particular individuals. Those who know the work of Massumi will realize that “Levels of Nothingness” might be one of the first attempts to make the synaesthetic amodality of perception apparent in a conscious and not only a pure experience. The collective modes of the event taking form cross many fields of expertise and experience that might be best described by the notion of mutual intensity for “a perception to come” - an intensive field of percepts offering themselves for experience to merge into presence without ever becoming immobile. On might regard the experiences generated in the event as an extensive continuum of collective intensive practices that has been extended for the first time to allow a wider audience to become part of the event. Thanks!

Hopefully, a longer interview with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Brian Massumi will be published in one of the following issues of Inflexions - A Journal for Research-Creation.