The challenge, however, is how can we extend the fold to the infinite to create the new. Creating the "new" means to break from folds that have been captured by regimes of signs, in the case of Photography, from the canons of taking photos that are still anchored on principles where hierarchy of elements are crucial. Instead, it involved the out of frame: humans and non-humans as co-participants in the process. To unfold is to continue the extension of an act. Not in a sense of reterritorializing what has been captured but to continue with a difference, the difference will transcend towards the new. It is becoming and unfolding with other matters and bodies response-ably (Barad, 2003). How do "We go from matter to manner; from earth and ground to habitats and salons, from the Texturologie to the Logologie"(Deleuze, 2006, p. 40)? Future researchers in the arts can develop this further to explore possible theoretical positions for the "new".
The photograph as a machinic assemblage of moving images invites us to be attuned to minor gestures (Manning, 2016), and mundane things that are muted. instead of emphasizing the superiority of the main subject in any photograph, Manning (2016) calls for a technique of disrupting the parallel forms of practice and knowing. In photography, edges(that we tend to believe separate the outside from inside) are fluid and always becoming, their veins form extensions, altering and sometimes losing parts and then regaining them during movement. It is constantly being altered "Even prehensions are ceaselessly entering and leaving variable components"(Deleuze, 2006, p. 90). Possibilities are realized at folds within this fluvia of folds and become figures, things or concepts.
As shown in this exposition, cultural images are always fluid, never static and difficult to arrest in a single photograph. If photographs are movement images (the folding of the outside to the inside) the essence of Hanoi’s culture lies in the mundane things that constitute the image. Curating the image of Hanoi could veer towards the potential aesthetics of more-than-humans and non-humans’ textures: the sounds, chaos, locals, and smell constantly changing yet infinitely present, that is, response-able and sustainable photography.
To break away from the molar folds, one needs to extend the folds towards the plane of consistency (Deleuze, 2007), to re-turn(Barad, 2018) once again and create filaments of fibres purifying the body from stabilized regimes of signs towards an image without organs.
To create an Image without Organs is to empty ourselves from "forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendence" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.159) that stratify our very own body lending it to capitalist agendas. An image without organs does not conform with the dogmatic image of thought instead, an Image without Organs(IwO) is a site where organs are not yet converted into organisms, an outside where it knows no Selves "because interior and exterior are equally a part of the immanence in which they have fused" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.156), a site of coagulation and as this exposition reveals, it is a site of FOLDINGS.
Foldings are attuned to heterogeneous matters and objects, always interconnected. The IwO which is not yet uprooted by organised transcendences is response-able (Barad, 2003) to other non-human counterparts. The bifurcated outside/inside are only a Cartesian worldling thus, the former can never be separated instead, always interconnected within the plane before organization takes place. Creating an IwO, means being response-able to the muted, the absent, and the silenced entities that were cast away during the signification process. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari advise:
"This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialisation, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.161).
Look for the point at which they could patiently and momentarily dismantle the organization of the organs we call the organism (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), that is to UNFOLD: to create new art concepts for photography away from the principles we inherited from the Renaissance emphasizing the human as subject or visuals purposively created to serve capitalist functions. Photography will bring together an art form that does not represent, but a space, a manufacturing agent that gives value to the muted, to other matters and to non-humans. IwO knows no discrimination, no hierarchical illusions of human power instead exercises ecological response-ability to which it is only a part.
This experiment was able to unpack the details of how images or photographs are constituted, a departure from human-centric forms of photography rather gives life to what is absent or muted. Photographs are movement images, a never-ending transformation of folds from the outside to the inside, folds back again and unfolds towards infinite multiplicities: a metamorphosis!
