School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemEditorial introduction: A creative life( 2006)In seeking authors who might address the relationship between the notions of philosophy and of creativity, the call for papers for this special issue of Angelaki invited consideration of the physical terms of each of these pursuits – philosophy and creative invention. The daily praxes of individual authorial and artistic pursuits are what have drawn us close to these selected texts. Individual authors’ obsessions and obsessive interests highlight the immense variation in how aesthetics operates as a determinant mode for those individuals and the communities with which they choose to engage.
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ItemHope: an e-modulating motion of deterritorialization( 2004)What keeps people going after an experience or encounter with an event that damages their sense of human vitality? The sense that is essential for a human organism to function properly: the will to live. The innate drive and joy of encounters and gleaning of skills which children own: the will to play. What causes the loss of one's possession of the will to joy; the curiosity inherent in the pursuit of the unfamiliar or the barely glimpsed; the production of fresh emotional responsiveness with which to claim an experiential event? What reduces the movement and modulations of emotion - e-modulating-motion - to an immobile point? An event that can cause the neural mapping of the traumatized body to return a message to the brain that says 'indifference' or 'despair', causing the body to undo its resident emotion of learned wonder. After a 'bomb sandwich', as Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf referred to the United States' practice of alternately dropping bombs and food over Afghanistan, what forms of hope or revelation could possibly be conveyed to the body of the receiver? The will to eat in the affective zone of probable pain, disability and death.
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ItemDeleuze's kiss: the sensory pause of screen affect( 2005)Imagine, if you will, that screening on the wall in front of you is American artist Andy Warhol’s 1963 film Kiss. Warhol’s anthropological documentary-style fifty minute film is of fixed camera head-shots of same and opposite sex couples french-kissing; passionately. The duration of the kiss on screen is dependent upon the length of 16mm film that Warhol had in his silent Bolex camera at the time, usually 100 feet – enough to make four minutes of screen kiss time. Kiss invokes the screen issues for the reading of this essay: desire, gender, duration, spectatorship, and affect.
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ItemAffective Intensity: Art as Sensorial Form(Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007)
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ItemAffective Terrorism(Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
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ItemAffective entropy: art as differential form( 2006)As I faintly smell the sulphur in the air, hear the crunch of my boots upon the salt crystals that have grown upon this art form, and taste the saltiest water ever, actualities are overtaken by the ‘limitless scale of one’s mind’, just as Robert Smithson described. As I traverse the territory of the infamous Spiral Jetty, the gyrations of this Utah time machine shift gear and offer a smorgasbord of sensations. Intensive magnitude. Morpho-sorcery. Alchemical differentiation. This affective place of my choosing turns me into a larval subject of Smithson’s system. This world sings its salt hymn in my ears: a slight wind off the snow covered mountain ranges that encircle the spiral coming across the solid lake, rustling the parched low level scrub, invisibly moving over the basalt rocks that cluster at Rozel Point. Today, the end of winter, it is a deathly silent space, haunted by the incessant affect of the multiple temporal positions that cohabit within this world’s stark geological formations. To arrive at the end point of the jetty, finally, is to realise that one has to indeed, begin at the ‘indeterminate’ yet singular middle to access the complex place of the reality one is immersed in, where the spinning categories of map and material – all possible configurations of east, south, west, north, mud, salt, crystals, rocks, water, as the infamous chant goes – admit uncertainty, ambiguity, chaos - just as the crystal lattice of the steady growth of the salt maintains a coherent site. One enters Smithson’s virtual underground movie house, generative of an endless thought of ‘jeopardy’ – ‘a spiral lightening bolt’. Does the experience of this walk reveal the aesthetic art form to be a chiasmatic synthesis of the fourth dimension – ‘laughter’ as Smithson once described it (after Buckminster Fuller) another name for – ‘entropic verbalization’? Or is this empirically formed cogito of mine merely another empty reminiscence? Here I will argue that Smithson’s spiral is indeed an affective prompt for a moving image of the thought of demented time (Deleuze); a deranged time (Smithson), a Peircean graph of duration that in charting aesthetic movement, becomes a study in the texture of forces.