The concept of "emergence" is linked to the concept of "affect or intensity", taken from the book "Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation" by philosopher Brian Massumi.

 

 

Intensity is incipiency, incipient action and expression. Intensity is not only incipience. It is also the beginning of a selection: the incipience of mutually exclusive pathways of action and expression, all but one of which will be inhibited, prevented from actualizing themselves completely. 

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Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation point, or a singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is “selected”. “Phase space” could be seen as a diagrammatic rendering of the dimension of the virtual. The organization of multiple levels that have different logics and temporal organizations, but are locked in resonance with each other and recapitulate the same event in divergent ways, recalls the fractal ontology and nonlinear causality underlying theories of complexity. 

 

 

In BSIDES the performers always stayed closed to the feeling of incipiency, the moment in which a process of formation was in the making. Whether the choreography was a set of improvisational techniques for movement, as in the first part of the performance; or whether was a fixed choreography of movements running in parallel with the clues of the music, as it happened in the second part.

 

In the first part Rob List produces his movement in relation with an invisible diagram of lines around his body, re activating them at each moment. The change of diagrammatic lines to follow and the re-activation or re-connection with the incipient quality of movement, generates an effect of continuation and interruption of the logic of movement perception. This logic of continuation-interruption allows the body to enter a pool of potential for new movement to emerge.

 

In the second part Antonio Onio and Michele Rizzo are not improvising. They know the complete choreography of gestures that goes with the song. They unleash the choreography little by little, as if completing a drawing with small traces. At the same time they imbue the instant of appearance of gestures with the energy of a spontaneous impulse, re-enacting the moment of emergence.

 

The difference in which the "concept and practice" of emergence is embodied in the two parts, follows a progressive logic going from less determinate form to more determinate form. Whereas "form" means stable score of choreography of gestures, of music and light composition and the stable set of relations between them.

 

Here the short examples of the two parts of the performance.