Tangentiality: Passing Relations in the Arts, Literature, Music, and Performance
University of Copenhagen, 15 Oct. - 17 Oct. 2024. Organizers: Department of Art and Cultural Studies / Stefanie Heine and Holger Schulze. READ MORE >>>
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Cursory Touches: Algorithmic Mediation as Tangential Conjuring
jessie beier & Rémy Bocquillon (Assistant Professor, Concordia University Montréal, Art Education & Lecturer, Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingoldstadt, Sociology)
The tangent – as line, as surface, as volume – is only actualized through encounter. This touching relation is always flee(t)ing, it is one of brief attention, an encounter en passant: the slight touching of shoulders on a crowded street, the longing brush of a hand along a dusty shelf, the skimming over of theories in an academic paper. A digressive departure? Or is it a distracted avoidance? Despite this “mere touching,” imprints, however slight, are left behind; traces are drawn, flows are redirected, desires remachined. The point of contact becomes a point of impact, a singular event wherein differential forces intersect in ways that we can’t see coming, only leaving. Such events carry no specific outcomes or utility, but they can nevertheless make their mark. The tangential relation, as cursory and punctual as it might be, is not indifferent, but emerges in difference. It is an encounter en passant that refuses to merely pass by.
Taking off from this tangential thinking, this collaborative performance-lecture experiments with passing relations as they might emerge, in unforeseen and non-linear ways, through aesthetic practices (where aesthetics refers to sensorial conditioning and perceptual distributions, aesthetics as aisthesis). In this particular occurrence, the invocation of tarot reading as an algorithmic medium turned occulted composition device will be combined with philosophical riffing and sonic computational techniques (such as live coding) in order to experiment with how seemingly codified and codifiable moments of interaction emerge not as causally-entangled relation but instead as “dark precursors” (Deleuze, 1994). Here, we understand the tangential relation as just one form of “aberrant nuptial” (Deleuze, 1994), as just one instance of the subtractive encounters that are enabled between the momentary touching of systems characterized by fundamental difference. It is through this touch that we hope to invoke, or better, conjure, unthought modes of collectivity where the “collective” refers to a sense of anorganic and inhuman multiplicity that deploys itself beyond individual entanglements toward “the side of preverbal intensities, indicating a logic of affects rather than a logic of delimited sets” (Guattari, 1995, p. 9). Through this performance-lecture we want to consider, in witchy ways, how the tangential meeting of “heterogeneous systems of couplings and resonance” (Assis & Giudici, 2017, p. 9) might impact our own thinking, as artists, teachers and researchers of sociology and pedagogy, in yet unthought ways.
