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TRANSITORY ART FROM THE EYE OF THE BODY AND BACK INTO BECOMING

by Sabin Borș

… Yet you would like to understand what transitory is, curiously…
Reading this, hearing that, one hopes to grasp a sense of what is coming through,
already aware of its passage, the movement of the unseen, the shift of knowledge,
the smothering ruin within.

Twentieth century philosophies have long strived to develop and overcome the operational concepts for the investigation and criticism of the representational and non-representational dimensions of the image. To say the image is that which contains the unseen in what is visible has become a truism, but it is also true of the way we think the transitory is the vessel of history or the way we consider the neutral for its ethics. There is an ‘economy’ at work between appearance and disappearance, one that inscribes the image with the power to divide the visible and the invisible, restructuring the ways in which our lives are defined within a certain culture of the image. Culture is dependent on visuality to such an extent that some phenomenological implications of this economy now lie forgotten.

Phenomenology – Transitory Ontology – Germinal Virtuality

The visible was already a transitory and almost imperceptible event in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The task of its actual representation was left to history’s castaways: artists and philosophers. Whether a “strait between exterior horizons and interior horizons” or “an ephemeral modulation of this world” [1] the visible for Merleau-Ponty was the illumination of a ‘momentary crystallization’ of visibility cast to draw up the topography and the trajectory of vision. Shapes stabilize in the exterior, while the subject intuitively captures them and thus institutes the visible through the very dematerialization that separates the subject from the object: “Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?” asks Merleau-Ponty. The very notion of chiasm was based on the oscillation between the visible and the invisible to account for the way intentionality is diffused and ‘the production of subjectivity’ immerses into the flesh of the world. For Heidegger, it was the openness of poetry that enables us to dwell with things by hovering above them. Poetry displays what things are and could be, while the poet calls “that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself”. [2] A ground of the apparent is brought into question here. Being is the foundation of things rather than the network of practical or cognitive relationships they share. In Process and Reality, Alfred North Whitehead discusses discontinuity as the essence of time, one that is nevertheless seen as a constant transition of one individuation to another, a continuity dependent on the decision of each existence. His phrase, “There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming” [3] marks a reversal of the order of causes: continuity is the effect of interferences between transitions and concrescences. The idea of an existential heritage passed down from one precursor to the entity that comes after it creates a series of inheritances and transmissions that Whitehead calls ‘trajectories.’ The actual entities are acts of becoming that form these trajectories. Whitehead divides them into concrescences, or “the fluency inherent in the constitution of the particular existent,” and transitions, or “the fluency whereby the perishing of the process, on the completion of the particular existent, constitutes the existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existents elicited by repetitions of process”. [4] To simplify, two moments come together and generate a succession of inheritances and transmissions that resembles rhythms or intervals. With every breath ceased, another germinal breath prepares to displace the interval, to span the linearity of time, to give it its breathless depth. Just like a heartbeat, movement relies on a series of discontinuous acts of becoming, a series of contractions and absorptions that sustain the measurable harmonies. And it is Deleuze who, after Anti-Oedipus, raised the one question that marked the transition to A Thousand Plateaus: How does one write a sociology of fluxes? How do you psychologize a process that has no ‘for whom’? This process describes the virtual connections and assemblages that Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Geology of Morals’ formulates as a process of stratification that disengages molecular forces from their misleading anthropomorphic and representational determinations. The social desiring-machine makes place for the stratifications of the brain that compose the image of thought. It is the infinite speed of thought that makes the transition between the various thresholds that compose the specific infinity of the concept. [5]

A more radical approach is taken by Alain Badiou in his attempt to find a ‘transitory ontology’ on a progression where nothing is concluded, an ‘intervallic dimension’ that has set no clear destination. [6] For Badiou, the event itself is transitory and cannot be decided within a situation. It can only be decided by a subject. A break from Heidegger’s poetic ontology brings Badiou closer to an engagement of thought with ‘contemporary atheism’, which departs from any lapse into the nihilism of finitude only to open up a different possibility in the field of the infinite fidelity to the event. Philosophy must assume the gravity of acting and thinking in its pursuit of the (trace of) truth by way of ‘restrained’ and militant action. Badiou’s militant subject is engaged in a mathematics of Being which is the thinking of every situation as pure multiple. (p. 30) This conception parts with Deleuze’s Nietzschean vitalism and the Anglo-Saxon linguistic turn to found mathematics as a thinking of ontology, or what Badiou calls the ‘Platonism of the multiple’, an attempt to separate logics and mathematics. Badiou’s Platonism acknowledges mathematics as a thought that is intransitive to sensible and linguistic experience, and dependent on a decision that makes space for the undecidable, while assuming that everything consistent exists. (p. 91) There is no knowing subject here; as mathematics proceeds axiomatically, thought must decide in favour of the axiom of choice. Binary oppositions subject/object or virtual/actual are abandoned in favour of an activation of being embodied in thought, with a logic of appearing that concerns the relations within possible situations. (p. 165)

In Semblance and Event [7], Brian Massumi’s discussion on the radical empiricism of William James draws on the distinction between ‘objective-transitions-leading-to-functional-ends’ and ‘experiences-and-percepts corresponding to them in the subject’. Since they “both are in the transition”, things and their experience are in transition together. Objects and subjects share this transitional movement of performative sharing, with the object bringing the subjective poles of the movement into phase. The object relates to ‘subjects’ as “differential poles integrating into a unity of movement”, which is the event. The duration of the event’s demonstrative performance is characterized by “a mutual participation co-defining the same dynamic” where subjective and objective elements “resolve back into differentials” only to let movement continue again. The object is an accumulation of transitions that is not defined by form but rather by the dispute of its renewal, as the identity of the event’s elements only follows their integration and dispersal: “What the object will definitely have been, and what precisely will have been the role of the subjects, is clear only in retrospect after each integration – by which time they are already in transit to another terminus.” Subject and object are thus defined in addition to one another, complementary, “in a continuing movement of integration and decoupling, phasing and dephasing, whose dynamic takes precedence over their always provisional identities”. [8] Subject and object are variations of themselves and each other concurrently; they inter-cross each other. Rather than fulfilling objective ends, says Massumi, we are carried “by wavelike tendencies, in a rollover of experiences perpetually substituting for each other”. As James puts it, “These [transitional] termini… are self-supporting. They are not ‘true’ of anything else, they simply are, are real. They ‘lean on nothing’… Rather, does the whole fabric of experience lean on them”. [9] It is a definition of art that must be performed and brought into effect, a definition of living art, or the arts of life, a transitional expression of ‘creative philosophy’ that is continuously in the making. A germinal virtuality seems to allow for transformations and inter-generational processes that hold the power to in-form relations and expressions.

The Touching Eye and the Hunt for Seeing

It is the relation between transition and virtuality that is of interest to an idea of transitory art. It should follow transitions understood as processes through which the actual occasions of art are produced. Transition and the migratory movement of the transitory suppose the transitioning to and from occasions, the interpretative repetition of the past that provides the conditions for novelty. In their attempt to define an aesthetics of transition, David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins [10] trace the recent history of ‘apocalyptic transformations’ the computer brought at the end of the twentieth century and unveil the transition of media as a medium in transition. The technological utopias grounded on participatory democracy see their reverse in “an online culture of chaos” where information is commodified and human experience is ‘denatured’ or displaced by the virtual reality of the computer screen. Periods characterized by cycles of innovation and experimentation that often end in creative anarchy and institutionalization, as shown by Debora L. Spar [11], have brought a need for “a pragmatic, historically informed perspective that maps a sensible middle ground” amidst current conceptual uncertainties and technological transitions, with “media change as an accretive, gradual process”. (p. 2) The coming moment of media convergence brings a need to “recognize that such convergences occur regularly in the history of communications and that they are especially likely to occur when an emerging technology has temporarily destabilized the relations among existing media”. (p. 3) William Uricchio carries the idea further. [12] The transitional status of media is given by its ongoing and multi-faceted evolution. Technology, signifying systems, cultural contexts and cultural practices meet the trans-national dimensions of variant cultural meanings and the cross-audience dimensions of representational pressures, identity problems and moral panics. Systematic deployments, the dramatic re-purposing of media systems, or the intermedial redefinition of media are resonant echoes of “a media present that is itself very much in transition […] a moment of media instability” that holds the power to inform the reconstitution of media (pp. 30-31) and “to resituate the possible meanings that an isolated medium can generate”. (p. 32)

These transitional instances can be observed in what concerns the video work of art. Despite the cinematic appearance of the narratives a video work produces, what it involves is a direct material coincidence between two micro temporal logics of sensation and computation. What constitutes the image in a video work of art is not the cinematic frame, but the contingencies of micro temporal frames of perceptibility. The cinematic image is made of micro images that are just as many micro temporal binding events. The very medium tells this to us. From the electromagnetic flow of the video to the algorithmic flow of the computer, a certain deterritorialization of the medium takes place. The transition from copper to fibre-optic cables informs the medium while the flow of information overcomes matter. But the images produced by electronic and digital technologies are transformations and composites of forces and intensities that dispute their fields within the flow.

It is Bernard Stiegler’s The Tongue of the Eye [13] that questions the meaning of ‘art history’ and raises the stakes for a thinking on transitory art. For Stiegler, existence is exceeded by consistence, which “are objects that do not exist, but which consist”. Existence is “that which projects a consistence that it is not” for we have a tendency not to act out. The aesthetic development of non-human beings proceeds by means of works, which is to say through technique, therein giving access to consistence. The artist, like the philosopher, scientist, lawyer, or politician have the task to invent new libidinal economies in the place of those no longer working: “In this context, artists have a very specific responsibility: it is in the work of art that what constitutes the libido makes itself most purely visible. What is the work of an artist – say, a painter? To produce an eye. […] it is painting, sculpture, architecture, the entire visibility of that which has been seen by those who have seen it only to the extent that they knew how to bring it to sight.” (pp. 227-228) Stiegler resumes: “The spiritual eye that visible works give us to see is woven by the hands of artists.” We step outside our own bodies, through a social body that is woven by a tekhnē – “the tongue with the hand of the writer, the eye with the hand of the painter, the ear with the hand and the eye of the musician”. An ‘organic arrangement’ is formed through the montage of various forms that are projected in order to give us our eyes. Most modern painters, says Stiegler, were obsessed “by the becoming-invisible of the visible”. (p. 228) In order for us to see, a work must first be shown. It is for this reason that the museum is a place where we train our eyes to see and to transform themselves to reach their vision. But for Stiegler, the aesthetic experience is replaced today by the aesthetic conditioning to which culture industry is making us regress: “We have been destroyed and blinded – all of us, for what we are – by this becoming-regressive of our ever-narrowing gaze [regard].” (p. 229) If art is to find its contemplative gaze on the comings and becomings into consistence, it must step back from “the voyeurist gaze introduced by the buzz, the latest find in what has become a veritable marketing of art, and a contradiction in terms”. An active contemplation is a technique to take care of oneself, the others, and the realm of others.

In Stiegler’s conception, we are technical and symbolic beings for as long as we regard “and reveal an eye that regards us in all that we see”. That which regards us like this is that which is constituted by our sharing of the world, i.e. our individuation with one another that constitutes ourselves as such. Stiegler’s account of a visit to the Prado Museum in Madrid opens the question of a pre-individual eye. The cultural superpositions in the collection of Western paintings allows the eye to “yield through space and time”, to constitute and deploy itself as a ‘milieu’. (p. 231) “Over-saturated by history – by a History of the eye – it constitutes what Simondon calls a pre-individual milieu, the pre-individual foundation of vision, which is to say, of the eye that is not in the eye socket, but rather like that which constitutes the symbolic process of transindividuation giving us to see the visible as it has never been seen. This transformation of the eye […] is called the history of art.” (p. 231) The transformation of the retinal eye takes place by assembling the organs through inanimate beings such as pigments of paint which thus become organic. “Every museum,” says Stiegler, “gives us to see this condition of seeing, and at the same time a genealogy of the eye that regards and is regarded […] even while it teaches the eye to see that to which it has yet to open. This transformation, which is the enlargening of the body by non-living organs […] produces organa, artifices, works as well as tools and things (which are all, always, tools in some manner). These artifices hold together bodies and put them in relation […].” (p. 232) The aesthetic turns of the nineteenth and twentieth century, or what Stiegler calls “a machinic turn in sensibility”, triggered a series of short-circuits in the process of transindividuation that broke away from the ideas of sociation and culturality as active relations towards art to give way to cultural consumption. The expansion of the sensible is replaced, for Stiegler, by “an aesthetic conditioning that induces gregarious behavior”. (p. 233) The “great technological and industrial mutation” currently taking place is, according to Stiegler, digitalization. The development of digital technologies and networks allows a symbolic life based on associative and participative relations. As the artist deals with the public, “he sculpts the social” and must fulfill the political role of securing the processes of transindividuation in the current aesthetic wars dominated by the culture industry.

The Re-Sociation of Relational Bodies

The question of how can art sculpt the social through associative and participative relations is central to anything we were to label as transitory art, given that digital art remains largely constrained within an image framework, and that many of the works we call ‘interactive’ do not succeed in overcoming the hegemony of the picture and the picturesque. [14] Art needs to engage the body in a way that unveils the transient contingencies of the body’s interactions with its environment. In doing so, it can challenge the idea of boundaries and the nature of constructions, whence the social and the political are founded. Art – and ‘transitory art’ in particular – must emerge in the space of reconstituent activity. The political implications of this are fundamental and go back to Hannah Arendt’s idea of the body politics in action, where the public only appears through the processes of speech and action. [15] Art must not create [reproduce?] the space of appearance, but create appearance itself, and in that give us to see the visible as it has never been seen. It is the multiple and mutually inclusive dimensions of reality that art of transitoriness must actuate, topological extensions of the real that engage all senses into a holistic experience.

Transitory art is not about the momentary, the provisional, or the content of moments. It is an art of mutual immanence, sharing the very in-ness and trailing of experience, without a perceptible transition. It is what Brian Massumi calls ‘experiential dissolve’ when discussing the affective event of anger: “There’s no determinate transition in a dissolve, just a continuous fading-out overlapping with a continuous fading-in. The point at which the changeover occurs is imperceptible by nature. It is purely abstract. But it must have happened. We know it did, because even if it wasn’t perceived, it was unmistakably felt. Known-felt, thought-felt. It’s a virtual affective event.” [16] The idea of transitoriness does not lie within the movement – it is an affective accumulation of shifting and varying non-localities. And to be able to render this, art must search for an affective eye endowed with the ability to fold vision and cause the folding of the body within the environment, a merge, a blending within the environment. The eye becomes the environment. It is what Deleuze has already seen as bodily forms of transition, in a more nuanced take on the idea of non-place as “a place only of changes”. These ideas are best reflected in dance and the choreography of thoughts it involves. “Dance makes directly perceptually-felt time of the body expressing its potential for change,” says Massumi, only to continue: “Dance is the conversion of the body’s movement in space into the Time of its alteration: its speculative translation into a universe of pure bodily becoming. […] The semblance of meaning produced by the dance is a direct, perceptually felt experience of the body’s power of animate becoming. Semblance of self-expression: pure impersonal expression of bodily power, in nonsensuous excess over the body. […] Body unlimited.” [17] This lived intensity and tension of living leads to existential procedures that can be translated artistically in order to convey the transformation of affects into emotion, so that it is their transition that renders us the continuous transformation of art and our re-invested vision, implicitly – “Any of these procedures can be narrativized in one way or another, structurally coded according to one version or another of what constitutes a structure, or procedurally formalized to one degree or another. Whichever path is taken, the point of conversion is the transformation of vitality affect into emotion. The conversion into emotion may be explicitly noted, thereby becoming the content itself.” [18]

Ideas of how we may understand transitory art and the transitoriness of art can also reflect Stamatia Portanova’s investigations on the digital as a metaphor of thought in Moving without a Body. [19] Portanova’s interpretation of technologies as ideas is based on ideas in matter, the potentiality lying behind materiality, and virtuality as a structural “incorporeal potential for variation”. The body becomes a map of both possible and impossible articulations and variations that, while “implicit in its composition”, open the body to transitional becomings. For Portanova, digital technology “is what modulates movements in a definitive manner; the digital is not a modulation but a codifying mold”. (p. 37) As such, it holds the potential to open perception to the “relational in-between” Erin Manning talks about, “as a resonating dimension of potential”. [20] By redefining movement into a series of virtual, rational and relational objects, digital technologies would desubjectify it and distinguish movement “from its mere organic and phenomenal embodiment”. (p. 64) A topological conception of both the body and its situation enables us to think of ourselves, art, gestures and activities in terms of the continuous subsistence as “the invariants of all transformational events”. Ultimately, it all comes down to the activation and actualization that would produce and “make felt [my emphasis] the schism between the virtual folds of duration and the actual openings of the now in its quality of passage. On its way”. [21] This is a way to think change without any thing changing, concludes Portanova in her account of Manning’s concepts, or rather “to activate the immutability of being (object) by replacing it with the movements of becoming (relation)”. Like objects, subjects are made of relation.

It is relation that makes me believe that one perspective was not sufficiently discussed: that of camouflage. An expression of the modernist impulse in both arts and politics, camouflage becomes meaningful as a way of seeing, being, and moving in the world, allowing one to blend in and stand out concurrently. But, as Hanna Rose Shell explains, [22] “it is an individuated form of self-awareness that is also part of a network of institutional practices. It is an adaptive logic of escape from photographic representation”. (p. 21) The static, serial and dynamic forms of camouflage reflect distinctive types of photographic reconnaissance, changing in proportion as environments and technologies evolve. Their convergence is an expression of the “chameleonic impulse” to represent, or what the author calls “the technological approximation of visual evanescence”. Camouflage is a seeing which “is activated precisely by the rendering invisible of the self”. (p. 23) As technologies take over, people become increasingly passive as images are accepted as truth, in an operational sense. Live bodies, natural objects and human activities “are the locus of active processes of self-fashioning and the substrate of camouflage media practices”. “What is the configuration of self versus environment that enables one to efface the traces of one’s own presence from photographic media of surveillance?” asks Hanna Rose Shell – “It is camouflage consciousness [my emphasis], in which full self-consciousness becomes literal photographic self-analysis.” (p. 23) Camouflage too is made of relation. It is becoming and becoming-relation, one that is logic and poetic at the same time.

A Museum of Transitory Art. ART UNLIMITED

OK, let’s say transitory art… But a museum of transitory art?

The museum of transitory art could be an institution that encompasses the relational logics of the transitory and offers a participatory perspective over artistic practices, which, through their affective vitality and incorporeal impressions, show us a seeing that contributes to our transindividuation as human beings. Far from seeing this museum in its strictly institutional sense, I instead see it as a shifting yet practicable state that defines a generalized model of political action towards us and the environment. A museum, i.e. a political memory which informs action models, conscious and unconscious constructions of our awareness. A museum, i.e. a curatorial act that attends to memory, not by framing it into confined spaces or conceptual frameworks, but precisely through making available, accessible and approachable a set of artistic practices that shift away from current artistic trends only to generalize transindividual ways of seeing and becoming. It is an evolutionary understanding of both art and architecture that challenges the natural, cultural and historical foundations to address a memorial ecosystem. From artistic display and cultural display to ethical (self) display. It is not only the borders of mediums that become immaterial, but the borders of life itself. Our own bodies become more fragile, our own identities more mobile, our own desires more indistinguishable, our own selves more unstable.

The metaphorical re-construction of modern art as transitory art expresses a critical shift. That is, an urgent need for (self-)criticism. Art can incite to expression only as long as it triggers self-awakening and challenges the cultural establishments of memory. I understand a museum of transitory art as a metaphor not only for the need to re-evaluate the foundational architecture and institution of the museum, but the very architecture of socio-political memory. A shift from economical rationality and technocratic bureaucracies to the civil logics of the public space, re-constituted. THE TRANSITORY IS THE MEMORY ITSELF. MEMORY IS THE EVENT. And it is memory, in the end, that a museum challenges, architecturally and institutionally. Art is not only seeing – transindividuation is introspection and, more importantly, recollection; a way of seeing and assuming what happens between, in-between artistic practices and exhibits, in-between the social and the political – in-between history and evolution, as consciousness first and then as human be(com)ings. While a didactic discipline continues to inform the visual stimulus of art as what we may call the pedagogy and education of seeing, art and its museums need to build the interiorly common memory, a germinal memory of ourselves as human be(com)ings.

A museum of transitory art, that is, an open space for our transition from input individuals to environs. A shift from the material and political archaeology of knowledge to the ‘stratigraphy’ of the living. The museum itself needs to interfere culture as discontinuity. In order to do this, a museum of transitory art needs to profanate the very institution of museum and art, so as to allow for a fundamental political restitution. This is not a museum of institutional practice, but rather the architecture of a metaphor. And it is this metaphor that can be turned into a model of political and aesthetic action. Ethical and pragmatic politics – spontaneous political aesthetics. It is our Boîte-en-valise – to challenge the confinement of art within the walls of a museum, not with the irony of preserving Readymades as works of art by an institution, as Duchamp has out-maneuvered the traditional concept of the museum through practice and theory, but as a re-sociated habitus bearing the full weight of responsibility for the beings to come.

Liberate (our)selves! Liberate (your)selves!

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References:

[1] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Intertwining, The Chiasm’, The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1968, p. 132.

[2] Martin Heidegger, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper and Row, New York, 1971, pp. 213-229, p. 218 in particular. Full quote: “What remains alien to the god, the sight of the sky – this is what is familiar to man. And what is that? Everything that shimmers and blooms in the sky and thus under the sky and thus on earth, everything that sounds and is fragrant, rises and comes – but also everything that goes and stumbles, moans and falls silent, pales and darkens. Into this, which is intimate to man but alien to the god, the unknown imparts itself, in order to remain guarded within it as the unknown. But the poet calls all the brightness of the sights of the sky and every sound of its courses and breezes into the singing word and there makes them shine and ring. Yet the poet, if he is a poet, does not describe the mere appearance of sky and earth. The poet calls, in the sights of the sky, that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself. In the familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is – unknown.” (p. 215)

[3] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, 1979, p. 35.

[4] Id., ibid., p. 210.

[5] “Concepts are ‘absolute surfaces or volumes’, forms whose only object is the inseparability of distinct variations.” The ‘survey’ [survol] is the state of the concept or its specific infinity, although the infinities may be larger or smaller according to the number of components, thresholds and bridges. In this sense the concept is act of thought, it is thought operating at infinite (although greater or lesser) speed.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, p. 21.

[6] Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, trans. by Norman Madarasz, State University of New York Press, New York, 2006.

[7] Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2011, especially pp. 29-37.

[8] Id., ibid.

[9] William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1996, p. 238 and p. 202, quoted by Brian Massumi in Semblance and Event, op. cit., p. 32.

[10] David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, ‘Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition’, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, edited by David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, associate editor: Brad Seawell, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2003, pp. 1-16.

[11] Debora L. Spar, Ruling the Waves: Cycles of Discovery, Chaos, and Wealth from the Compass to the Internet, Harcourt, New York, 2011, mentioned in id., ibid., p. 2.

[12] William Uricchio, ‘Historicizing Media in Transition’, Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition, op. cit., pp. 23-39.

[13] Bernard Stiegler, “The Tongue of the Eye: What ‘Art History’ Means”, translated by Thangam Ravindranathan with Bernard Geoghegan, in Releasing the Image: from literature to new media, edited by Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2011, pp. 222-236.

[14] Installations relying on digital images rarely rethink the body and the socius in the environment and instead demonstrate the technological coups rather than an actual merging within the environment. Since most of the surfaces inciting to active responses rely on a series of stills (I touch the wall or I move my hand, the wall changes colour when and sometimes where the hand made the touch or the movement), it is a rather ‘didactic’ interaction that visually demonstrates that interactions actually take place. But is the hand nothing more than a proximate switch?

[15] Hannah Arendt – The Human Condition, second edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998.

[16] Brian Massumi, op. cit., p. 65.

[17] Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, translated by Séan Hand, University Of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, quoted and explained by Brian Massumi, op. cit., pp. 140-141.

[18] Brian Massumi, op. cit., p. 153.

[19] Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 2013.

[20] Erin Manning, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, Cambrige, MA: MIT Press, 2009, p. 66, quoted in Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body, op. cit., p. 38.

[21] Erin Manning, ‘The Art of Time,’ in the catalog of the 2012 Sydney Biennale, p. 2, quoted by Stamatia Portanova, Moving without a Body, op. cit., p. 90.

[22] The following ideas are taken from Hanna Rose Shell’s remarkable investigations in Hide and Seek. Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance, MIT Press / Zone Books, 2012.