This post is comlpetely overdue. I don’t think I’ll get it finished now. So I’ll post it as is…
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Had the last day of the New Mobilities workshop Saturday and I have been finishing my marking. The workshop was a series of three long days and even longer nights of wonderful engagement with a bunch of people who are all interested in similar or at least congruent sets of problems. The following is a session by session breakdown of the workshop. It is incomplete and this is mainly a result of my extreme tiredness and exhausted capacity for intellectual engagement… which I guess you could call burnout. I am totally drained. I have written these notes up over a week period in the breaks between other jobs and activities.
Introductory session
Anna Munster introduced the workshop and what was to hopefully happen over th next couple of days. The whole group was then organised into inner and outer rings for a practical exercise, created by Andrew Murphie, called ‘Concept Speed Dating’ (CSD). Like its (explicitly) libidinal counterpart, CSD involves brief five minute discussions of a concept derived from a chocolate wheel of concepts. The inside ring moved to the next ‘date’ every five minutes. Here are the concepts and the notes I wrote up for each discussion:
Processual Singularization
– nexus of actual occassions
– movement in two ways
– temporal aspect
– making of the singular
– movement of occassion
– tautology
– organic
– muscularity – Futurists
– society (Whitehead)
– always in process
Aesthetic Perception
– two models – resemblance vs force
– internalised response
– lines of force
– Bergson – chess players
– car people lose weight
– what they can do
– head turners
– Manuel DeLanda
– Media – perception – vector
– lines of force
– learning how to forget
Mobilization
– channel swapping
– disciplined mobilization (Grossberg) – rock formation
– flash mobs (Rheingold) – gathering
– mobilities vs mobilization
– efficiency vs efficacy (McKenzie)
– freedom of movement vs movement of freedom (Tomkins)
– automonomy – quasi-cause
– control and command vs emergent forms of mobilization
First Session
Brian Massumi and Erin Manning
– not presuppose what a body is — form or shape or idea
– question of vision not popular for some time — move away from vision hasty, older models, comes back in oddest places
– passive reception — idea order in world + order in body
– different practices create concepts
– return to vision is a return to movement
we then did a movement exercise that is rather complicated. it involved walking around in the room, then finding another body to focus on, then copying there movements, then finding another body and trying to hold the two in one’s field of vision and attention at once, then final move was to fall near someone and get them to ctach you. Ben fell near me calling out, and I dropped him. Sorry doods!
– safety + risk
– movement relationality produced the whole
– safety/task changed composition of movement
– perception awlays happening in movement
– in-between space as a very full space, fullness of the gap
– something we think of as vision
– Mach’s picture
– staging of another event of perception
– noe wants the virtual to be in opposition to the actual [as does Post], not the same as actualisation
– bergson reading
– composers [virtuosity?]
– infrastructure staging of another event
– schema (ala bergson) level of the virtual event
– recursive self-organising loop, amodality
Second Session