Program note (EN)
Machinic propositions is an artistic project and an attempt to critically examine Deleuze and Guattari’s theorems of deterritorialization as found in chapter seven and ten of their seminal book A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980). The output will be an audio-visual expression with the same over-arching goal to attempt to counteract the predominance of one medium over the other. Our objective is not to integrate them, but to approach what is described as “a confidence with no possible interlocutor” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2006).
Our artistic method is one where conceptual deduction and improvisation play central roles. It has grown out of our thinking about contemporary media and our attempts to critically examine both our own pro-technical approach and the hyper media-landscape we live in. This method was developed based on our artistic ideas, the needs of the projects we engage in and the conditions of our respective practices. At the core of our work lies the attempt to deconstruct the relationship between sound and image. Our work process is slow and meticulous. The work on the present project began over a year ago and is likely to continue past the premiere at the Dare conference in November 2017. In other words, the actual work only materializes at the very end of a relatively long process of interaction.
There are interesting parallels between the way we work, and the idea of a style as the ability to “stammer in one’s own language” (ibid.). In this sense our working process is situated in our personal conditions giving us concrete access to both the attempt to stutter in “language” and the attempt to avoid it in “speech”. Although the work here proposed does not yet exist in its final form, it started a year ago with reading, discussions and conceptual experiments.
The modes of synchronization that have become central to our works will be further explored in the modes of thinking relating to the theorems introduced by D\&G (in particular the second theorem is of interest to the notion of synchronization). There are however, many points of entry. First, the systems of de/re-territorialization in this context we interpret as the attempt to detach both sound and image from their highly defined modes of engagement. Second, we will continue to examine what the actual relations are within our system of working, ranging from a historical view of audio/visual art to our specific conditions of working. One mode through which we will experiment with these topics, related to all theorems but particularly the first, is to change roles in the work process.
Through the theorems loosely described in chapter seven and ten of A Thousand Plateaus we will work out an abstract audio/visual work. As artists there is nothing to suggest that we are able to provide a philosophical output with scholarly relevance. The potential interest of this project for this context is instead the way our process informs our’s and other’s reading of D\&G. More specifically, the way the senses see and hear in our work may be seen to create a ‘zone of indeterminacy’ may provide possibilities for understanding what we do as artists and researchers, but may also provide openings into understanding what the significance of a ``generalized chromatisism’’ (as mentioned in the call) may develop into in other contexts as well. The conflict between the video and the audio in our work is never one which we attempt to overcome but one we strive to see precisely as the “opposite of a couple”.