A DELEUZIAN BLOB: ENGINEERING VENTRILOQUIST GEOMETRY

This is the first post in what you could call a series. A series that emerges out of the chronology of thinking itself, not as a chronology of thoughts. These are distinct as the latter stratifies an order for coherence, the former is the articulations of a stream of thoughts, at best ideas, dramatized and concatenated as a theoretical repository for my artistic practice. Before unleashing a cacophonous plenum of ideas, methods and confusions, we need to adjust some settings of the software. It is indeed software, but open source, as we will access the sequences of thoughts that eventually present the customized shape of our first concept: the Blob. The project that unfolds is expanding upon the recent experiments in toy philosophy and toy aesthetics by respectively Reza Negarestani and Adam Berg. In the latter aesthetics is not encountered or approached as a philosophy of art but as a cognitive engagement with what it means to think aesthetically. It alludes to a conjoined space where art and philosophy form a symphysis perturbed by an aesthetic dimension. In Berg’s case a model for Wittgenstein’s pinball machine is sketched through different steps of aesthetic theory and short circuited through a ‘pain glove’ to real experience.
The following below will share similar parameters to toy aesthetics albeit adhere different functionalities. The project infuses a dynamic parameter into an analytic function, migrating from an axiomatic to an axiodynamic system reminiscent of Deleuze’s deviation: a theatre of philosophy. . The latter is understood as a parametric philosophy where axioms are not statically conjoined to logically derive theorems, but instead susceptible to entropic unknowns that exert their influence upon the functionality of a finite system (quantified). It nevertheless opts to function as a “cognitive model that is compatible and continuous with science and logic”. The building of our theatre is also sympathetic to Einstein’s concrete expansion of a purely analytic geometric approach to geometry embedded within a physical universe to which Einstein referred to as Dynamical Geometry or practical geometry: “geometry not as a fixed framework with physics, but a dynamical field that interacts with other physical fields of nature.”
Quite naturally it will become clear what this ‘theatre’ entails within the procedural generation of thought, but important to emphasise is that here the function does not execute, as in Euclidean geometry a single output, but instead parameterisation enables the latter to produce an infinite variety of ‘shapes’. We explicitly refer to it as theatre since we are not working towards irrecusable proofs, but choreograph a ‘movement of thought’.
We’ll attempt to detonate an emperico-rational fusion as an aesthetic model that follows Berg’s ‘toy model’, which on his turn is designed in reference to Nelson Goodman’s ‘way of world-making’. We will use the toy model as our repository to openly dissect any concealed operations arising. The toy model is the infinite but bounded democratic plane where art and philosophy encounter as non-hierarchical and independent vectors of thought and cannot rely on the formation of logos alone, but instead adhere to similar circuits as that of the diagram that operate as a “prosthetic device for intuition and thought”.
Concretely we juxtapose the features and functionality of parametric CAD modelling software – geometry real time – with a philosophical infrastructure, hence the denominator philosophical software. (At this moment to give you a deeper understanding of the software works distracting, thus for the sake of our exploration its mechanisms will be clarified along our philosophical building.) What unfolds is not an orthodox idea -> proposition -> syllogism sequence, but follows the toy-approach reminiscent to the rules of a game. What our bespoke software exposes is the ‘space’ through which a thought progresses, enabling a tracking of the ‘philosophical building’, but its demolition as well.
The purpose for this first project, or the engineering of our first software, is set to mutilate the Kantian a priori intuition (Anschauung) as a Deleuzo-Einsteinian ventriloquist. We encounter Deleuze himself as a ventriloquist of geometry when we juxtapose his procedural (un)folding to that of the mathematical build up of computational modelling. We will approach space primarily mathematically and scrutinise his deformation of mathematical concepts like subdivision, curvature, topology and arithmetic to engineer our software.
Its important as objective that our eventual understanding must arise within art-philosophical dimensions and can be read as a forensic reconstruction of the mutilation of Kant’s a priori intuition. It re-parameterises Kant’s intuition as a logical construct for, and accessible as methodology.
The analogue between parametric modelling software and an idiosyncratic philosophical program does not entail a superposition of one over the other. Such enforcement would reduce any philosophical program to a series of computations without any qualitative difference. From the opposite direction, any arbitrary shape could reveal in certain degree a philosophical concept. The question that emerges is: how can we unroll a sophisticated program that does not appear as a superficial attribution of surface encounters?
The model our endeavour proposes is to approach philosophy as a creative world-building, but with foreign tools of which we have to define its telos yet. We enter the world of philosophy not as kings, but as builder of concepts.
We must adhere to a logical procedurality of thought, but explore the emerging shapes in between with experiment and creativity. We can’t lay the roof of a house without its walls standing, and even if we would manage without, would the concerning part still be a roof? The same applies to a work of art: what defines the logical structure of an abstract painting? Does the canvas precedes the paint, and does aesthetic experience exists before colour? [Speak of consistency rather than logical order.
There’s a logical order to ideas and epistemological frameworks, but we attempt to disrupt its continuity and infuse an artistic parasite into philosophy’s logical program and dissects the alienated body. But how do we proceed with philosophy when we dissect it with artistic means? Deleuze himself already carefully imposed this question upon us with his machinic portrait of Kant? Where Kant’s head – the four categories – appears as caricature Zeus towering above the shallow gulf of Time. → Does such a procedure always become a parody? And if so, what does parody exposes of philosophy?
We will proceed along similar lines. We will encounter a rational method directly aesthetically, that is, we’ll create a theatre of the geometric method, a theatre of the rigorous repetition geometry already is, and ‘in the theatre of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters – the whole apparatus of repetition as a “terrible power.”
But reciprocally, what will be left or uphold of Deleuze, a philosophy famous for its intentional convolution of concepts and ashtray from any apodictic procedure, when its exposed to analytic contamination?