Dynamics of Sensemaking

dalpofzs (Mihai Băcăran, Darie Nemeș-Bota, Bogdan Dumitrescu, Alexandra Dumitrescu), Independent Art Collective

Dynamics of Sensemaking is a multimodal work that combines theoretical inquiry and art practice. It attempts to think about and to play with the dynamics of sense, understood, drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, both as a surface effect and as a genetic vector in the coagulation of embodied subjectivity and of its associated milieu (Deleuze, 1969/1990, 1968/1994). Sense acts as an infinitely thin membrane between thought and things, between embodied experience and the cosmos, but also as a vector that participates in the construction and deconstruction of the individual—a process that always happens in a political collective space, in the intimacy-of-the-common (Combes, 1999/2013, pp. 51-55)—and of its world: sense as a vector for what Gilbert Simondon (2005) theorizes as the individuation of the couple individual-associated milieu.

Engaging with Deleuze’s understanding of the image in the Cinema books (1983, 1985), Cristóbal Escobar argues in The Intensive Image in Deleuze’s Film-Philosophy (2023) that there is an intensive dimension to the cinematic image—especially prominent in a certain poetic lineage of film history (p. 2, p.184)—that opens up the image, beyond representation, towards a presence of sensation that cannot be neatly solved by reason (pp. 2-9). Escobar is interested in images that displace and glitch both the sense of film and the sense of the world and open up an unruly dynamic of sense that actively modulates the processes of individuation that drive our being and becoming. In Alexander Wilson’s (2019) words this genetic process driven by the dynamic of sense can be understood as the epistemaaesthetic co-constitution of subject and world. The intensive image introduces a glitch, a dis-orienting impulse, that pushes us to renegotiate our being in the world in an intensive un-differenciated aesthetic field that is the underlying condition of all knowledge, but that in its turn is oriented by the system of knowledge that it subtends and dis-orients.

 We are interested here in the extent to which the intensive-image could be a tool for art practice, spectatorship, and misosophic thinking—Deleuze’s term: thinking against thought, thinking against the inertial patterns of thought, against recognition and representation (1968/1994, p. 139)—beyond the realm of cinema. Echoing Hito Steyerl’s (2009) argument for ‘the poor image’, we opted in this work for using the relatively low definition, amateurish, camera feed of our mobile devices, modulating it in real-time with the help of simple algorithms written in Hydra, an open access video synthesizer developed by Olivia Jack (hydra.ojack.xyz). It is not technological mastery and professionalism that the work seeks, but a critical appropriation and experimental misuse of widespread contemporary image technologies. Each of the three chapters is filmed by a different group member, on a different device, in a different geographical location. What remains constant is the modulation performed by the code. The simple repetitive patterns generated by the snippets of code written in Hydra perform a ‘rhythmization’ of technologically mediated perception and subtly shift the quality of embodied experience [1].

The text slides that separate the three chapters are short poems that create strong sensory sensations and vivid images, expanding the interplay between the actual, the virtual, representation, and sense. Concrete, fire, wet wood are sensory but abstract images that are connected to hard, concrete references like the font Avenir Next Condensed or a young girl in Yakutsk—this aspiration towards concreteness being at the same time glitched by the fundamental iterability of the trace and irreducible “polysemantism”. A similar interplay also takes place visually between the abstract modulated moving images and the sections where the images are not obviously modified by the code—including the soft and almost abstract view of passing clouds and the image of the hard, concrete sculpted frieze, itself also subject to change from degradation, violent destruction and restoration.

We lead technologically mediated lives in which the act of seeing is fundamental. But seeing is a complex phenomenon, viscerally linked to our technological prostheses (Stiegler, 2001), our embodied affectivity (Marks, 2002; Sobchack, 1992), and our desires and memories. Through our eyes, screens, cameras, and neurons, through our skin and microbiomes, we are unable not to make sense of what we perceive, a sense that is conditioned by our personal and collective histories. When seeing, we are patients to the movement of sense. Yet sense is not an unchanging a-priori given, but the result of contingent embodied performances—as Sara Ahmed astutely argues in Queer Phenomenology (2006) embodied experience takes place in an always already oriented space, but the lines of orientation are the result of ongoing embodied performances marked by contingent dis-orienting events and processes.

 Dynamics of Sensemaking is a ludic take on all this. In the first instance, it proposes a playful visual representation for the dynamic of sense as we understand it (a representation that is necessarily erroneous, inasmuch as the dynamic of sense is never captured without a reminder in representation): our cosmos is recursively modulated by our technologically informed personal and collective histories—cf. Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics (2016, 2019)—just as the camera feed is modulated live by the simple algorithms. No cosmos ‘before’ being contingently modulated, no default disembodied sense. A simple ‘poor’ video image to point towards a set of rather convoluted theoretical arguments.

Passing through this maybe superficial analogy, things get more complex. Sense unfolds here in a heterogeneous interplay of experiences that refuses any simple convergence towards an overarching conceptual explanation. There is no solid, pre-given sense that we as ‘artists’ intend to communicate to the spectators. Rather the sense of the work tentatively coagulates, in each spectatorial gesture, at the intersection of heterogeneous intensive images (visual, auditive, linguistic, and otherwise). Sense: clandestine eyes, peeling posters in Cyrillic characters reading ‘купувам […]’ (‘I buy […]’), decaying fruits, Amitriptyline, superimposed oscillators, Avenir Next Condensed, noise, landscapes seen through car windows, windmills under scattered clouds, a 19th-century frieze inspired by a fictional account of the destruction of Pompeii, olfactive memories, phosphenes, spraying “Content” on plastic brains, rhythms of abstract pixelated patterns, the distances between us, the devices in our hands, but also everything in this video work that touches yet cannot bear the weight of a name. We invite the spectators to follow these dis-orienting impulses and to become patients to the non-teleological movement of sense beyond any univocal simple capture in rational explanation [2].

Notes

 [1] On the embodied effects of the ‘rhythmization of perception’ in audio-visual experiments cf. Catherine Grant (2015).

[2] We thank the two anonymous reviewers for generously engaging with the work and offering valuable feedback.

Bibliography

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