Concepts Are Mental Images: The Work as Ruin

Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Creative Technologies

This chapter explores the philosophical notion of The Virtual in response to the writings of Gilles Deleuze and unfolds this thinking through its interdisciplinary and transformative effects upon contemporary fine art. The Virtual is discussed in relation to forms of contemporary painting, yet the chapter provides a model for thinking through interdisciplinarity within, and from, other media. The research investigates the perceived resistance of painting to explore external possibilities and introduces methodological strategies, which encounter externality as a means for establishing radical change. In this way, the Virtual acts as an instigator for change, which effectively destabilises the pre-formity attached to medium specific practices. It is for this reason that the Virtual forces external relationships and connections to come to the fore in order to radically alter and transform the physical and conceptual constructs of different disciplines. Alongside the discussion of the Virtual and its direct affects upon artistic practices, the chapter discusses literary models including hybridity and metamorphosis as potential key elements affecting transformative change.

Drawing Futures: Speculations in Contemporary Drawing for Art and Architecture (UCL Press), 2016

Over the latter half of the twentieth century the proliferation of images has affected deeply the way we approach and engage with our surroundings, contributing to an increasingly mediated experience of reality. We ‘place’ ourselves in this world not only through real but also through simulated spaces and representations. In the emergence of architectural space as a space of congested representations and the privileging of the image as simulation rather than representation, architectural drawing conventions are faced with the inadequacy of their codes in articulating new perceptions of spaces. Most importantly however, what is challenged is the operation of drawing as not image or object, but as a distinct projective spatiality that mediates between the tangible reality of figuration and the projected spatiality of speculation. The increasing shift from physical experience to visually consumed impressions¬¬ of spaces can be traced back to the explorations and technological advancements of early modernity that brought to the fore the interrelation between space and time. In this context it can be considered as derived not by the digital mediations and manifestations of spaces but rather by a wider visual culture which can be, through Gilles Deleuze’s writing on cinema (Deleuze, 1983, 1985), as well as Jonathan Beller’s concept of the ‘Cinematic Mode of Production’ considered as ‘cinematic’ (Beller, 2002). As both Deleuze and Beller suggest, the cinematic does not simply entail the production of imagery but also the consequent production of consciousness and perception as ideology, challenging thus the interrelation between notions of reality, language and virtuality. This paper will look into the ways that the effects of virtuality that emerge in, and are operative for, the performativity of drawing as a ‘space of representation’ (Dorrian and Hawker, 2002) are contested by the effects of virtuality produced out of the cinematic, as the former seem to facilitate while the latter seem to bypass the production of spatial concepts. In light of the range of representational, recording, image and form producing possibilities offered by digital media – described by Beller as successors of the cinematic – this paper considers the current ‘digital turn’ of architecture as the architectural counterpart of the representational experimentations of modernist artists. This turn is situated in relation to the Cartographic and Geographic turns of architecture and architectural representation, as introduced respectively by Mark Dorrian (2005) and David Gissen (2008). In these latter turns, the pressure initially exerted upon architectural practice by the so-called crisis of representation, drawn out of the philosophical and political debates of the 1960s (Tschumi, 1996) is considered through opposing strategies of representation and simulation. The chapter finally argues that what is at stake in the digital not-yet-turn but challenge of architecture, is neither the skeuomorphic imitation of drawing’s analogue techniques, nor the production of iconic imagery, but rather the ‘domestication’ (Ingraham, 1998) of the medium as a new field of performance for architectural thinking-through-drawing through the (re)consideration of convention as a ground capable of facilitating both semiotic integrity and performance.

DeMaterializations in Art and Art-Historical Discourse in the Twentieth Century, eds. W. Bałus, M. Kunińska, 2018

In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze sees World War II as a historical event underpinning divergent taxonomies; the post-war period greatly increases the situations in which we are faced with spaces we no longer know how to describe, to which we longer know how to react. Deleuze refers to a crisis of the action-image in cinema, which corresponds to the war’s historical caesura. In Italian neorealist cinema, he sees a delinkage between the affection-image, the perception-image and the relation-image, and identifies certain formal inventions that reduce the distance between fiction and reality. The result is the production of a formal or material ‘additional reality’, a kind of formalism in the service of content. This leads Deleuze to ask whether the problem of the real arises in relation to form or to content. I, however, examine the possibility of applying Deleuze’s same question regarding neorealism to the domain of architecture. Neorealism in cinema is associated with the subordination of the image to the demands of new signs. For example, in neorealism, the montage of representations is replaced by the sequence shot. This leads to the invention of a new type of image, the ‘fact-image’, which address a new form of reality. As André Bazin notes of Roberto Rossellini’s films, the neorealist reversal of the image’s subordination to montage serves as a critique of how pre-established meanings (in images) are imposed on the spectator. In relation to architecture, this leads us critique pre-established meanings of spaces in postwar architecture. For instance, what new types of signs emerge in architecture as a result of World War II? And how can we see a notion of virtual becoming taking place in architecture? Neorealist architecture understands constructions in relation to a rhythm of aggregation evident in their successive elements. It’s often characterized by the fabrication of a new architectural language that aims to challenge “International Style” and to overcome rationalist types of composition. At the same time, there’s also a passage from a pre-established concept of compositional unity to one obtained by means of superposition, expressed through the obsessive fragmentation of walls and fences, as in the case of “Quartiere Tiburtino”. Furthermore, we also see an elaboration of formal discontinuities and a rediscovery of the value of the street, an attempt to examine surgically the singularities of the visible world and everyday life, which unfolds according to a logic of impersonal individuation, rather than personal individualization. Special attention is paid to a pre-individual notion that through the sheer materiality of living, the powers of a life can be attained. Indeed, something virtual doesn’t lack reality, but is rather engaged in a process of actualization which lends it its singularities. Similarly, the fabrication of architectural assemblages doesn’t imply a translation from the virtual to the actual. Instead, every stage of the genetic process is characterized by a coalescence of actuality and virtuality. The resulting indiscernibility is not produced in the mind, but it is inherent in their material expression.

Inter- fotografía y arquitectura / inter- photography and architecture, 2016

The shift in visual technologies from the early twentieth century understandings of interior vs. exterior and subject vs. object are radically different when compared to contemporary architectural media and the immersive environments that they suggest. The rethinking of the photographic medium as a digital construct can reveal its virtual potentials as an 'architecture' in and of itself. The digital technologies used in the custom-made optical device, the diplorasis, allow for a re-thinking of both architectural and photographic discourses, as they reveal their tendencies to converge with one another. This is important today because vision, and hence the body, is increasingly embedded within media environments. The self is multiplied within virtual domains that in turn affect the actual space of the corporeal body. In this respect, it is crucial to think how time-based media re-present our spatial environments and how this virtuality shifts the locus of the body and its limits to produce new understandings of interior/exterior, subject/object. keywords Digital photography, Virtual environments george themistokleous

The International Encyclopedia of Art and Design Education, 2018

Art between practice and theory : theoretical reflections on artistic reality on the threshold of the third millennium, 2023

2019

Combining A. Naess’s vision of “ecospheric belonging” and Guattari’s concept of an “ecosophy” as a science set “to create new systems of valorisaion, a new taste for life . . . ,” this paper looks at a string of robotic shows by SRL from the late 1970s. These shows uniformly address the possibility of relating to an environment and the question of artefactual autonomy but at the same time critique these very same notions. Whereas they spell out the very problem of being “alive” and constituting an “organism,” they also attest to a certain level of participation that reveals a radical exposure to a world’s ontological vulnerability. The robotic performances remain indifferent to any rhetoric that engages in the imposition of levels of being. We have not so much alliances of beings different “in nature” but an incessant exercise in co-determinative practices. The robotic shows put on display infra-subjective ways of co-alignment between heterogeneous systems in inviting us to think of the possibility of an eco-philosophical body across the continuum of what is nominally known as the “living” and the “non-living.” Within this scenario, it is no longer the organism that determines the formation of a biome but the responsive potential of a given entity (or non-entity). The conceptual core of this argument encompasses (1) a shift from ontological scenarios that favour actuality to ones favouring ontologies of the virtual, and (2) a shift from forms of artistic production designated as “artwork” toward forms that are “onto-ecological”— that is, amalgams of philosophical, political, and ontological features that carry within themselves an ethics of sustainability. The “ecology of the virtual” speaks to an infra-bodily and infra-human level of analysis that operates across individuals nominally present as “human” and “artefactual.” In being so, it accounts for pre-personal ways of partaking in a world. Here Guattari puts forward an ontological proposition to bring forth reformed notions of ethics, aesthetics, and politics that ultimately fuse into a concept of an artwork as an ecological space of radical exposure. Robotic performance puts on display exactly one such space that allows us to begin refiguring the concept of “artefact” positively and inclusively. Here an “ecology of the virtual” works as a responsive system that reverses the distinctions (in degrees of being) made within an already constituted world and prompts us to think “between natures.” The concept allows us to reach toward an ontological region that can be perceived as matter-forming, allowing for a co-habitation of nominally incongruent worlds.

Styles of Communication, 2010

This article deals with the issue of finding a new exhibition site inside the transgression art area, to be more precise, the virtual space. The challenge to overcome the existing frontiers brings transgression in front of the virtual and the objects undergo visible changes starting from the artist’s status. The mechanics of producing an artistic product in the virtual world differ from what the artist used to make and now the public comes only to decrypt the image of the work. The onlooker does not have the work of art in front of him/her, it is hidden in and by the new languages the artist works with.

Performance Research, 2006

In this paper, I offer a description of various performance and art practices which involve interaction with "new technologies"-such as, motion tracking, artificial intelligence, 3D modeling and animation, robotics, digital paint, interactive sound technology, and biotechnology. My theoretical approach consists of both an aesthetic perspective, a development from my previous liminal theorisation, and a neuroesthetic approach, which relates to the biological processes that inform how we perceive. According to Heidegger: Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.