T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
Julia Bee / Amélie Brisson-Darveau / Christoph Brunner / Gerko Egert / Joel Mason / Ana Ramos
Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf, DE
Zurich University of the Arts, CH
Zurich University of the Arts, CH
Ghent University, BE
Concordia University, Montreal, CA
Université de Montréal, CA
Actively Not Arriving: A Durational Atmospheric Intervention
Day 1, 9 November, De Bijloke Foyer, 16:30–18:30
We propose the creation of a singular foyer for encounter and thinking-feeling in a collaborative, open-source environment. Concretely, we plan to install a space for ongoing modulation between art and philosophy/thinking. Located in a transient area of the conference, the space will processually tend intensities as they modulate in the intervals of the event, offering specific techniques and materials, such as collective writing, open microphone, collaging/cut-ups/diagramming, and platforms for presentations and discussions to extrapolate themselves into the atmospheric space through new formulations. In this sense, we are thinking of a space inhabited by the desire for situations that oblige us to think and act in the presence of what is at stake. In the temporal aspect of the increasingly professional expectations of what constitutes a successful academic/artistic life, we are thinking about the things “we didn’t get to,” “won’t get to,” and “don’t need to arrive at” as the attractors of a dark precursor that is not a moment in time but a movement-across as trans-temporal force. Being in the arch of getting there (while not arriving) is the process and is the atmosphere we are looking to activate in Ghent.
“Actively not arriving” is what we consider study, as delineated by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. This conception of study does not rely on any “official” beginning of the process, as would be the case in more traditional educational contexts. In other words, study is always already happening, constantly creating new ways of thinking collectively. We add to this a concept of “atmospheres”: how does study formulate itself atmospherically, as modular forces that can be collectively tended? How do we study together? What is the role of study in contrast to knowledge production and communication? What is at stake emerges here out of a concern for the ways that knowledge and practice are combined in artistic research. We are wondering how modes and moods of atmospheres of study generate new kinds of fugitive planning, that is “research on the go,” rather than research that fits a given framework to be aligned with and to then extract its peer-reviewed surplus value. Study is seeking out the arch as that which makes an event collectively move across different practices, bodies, thoughts, and feeling. An arch in its very arching is without a discrete beginning and end, a dark precursor actualising itself as both a local milieu and a trans-temporal process. How can we take account of these processes in the immediacy of study, as that which is always already underway? And how can we tend to its unfolding throughout the arching of an event and the potential of its remnants that are left hanging in the air? not beginning, not ending, not arriving: a continuing radiation.
We are part of SenseLab—A Laboratory for Thought in Motion, where we experiment in collective practices converging around research creation. Coming from different disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and arts our interest resides in composing situations for slow, emergent, and delicate techniques for relation and their capacity to problematise transversally.