Relational Intervals, or How to Make the Network Felt
Goal to make apparent the connective tissue of the event, to bring into appearance the network beyond its actual nodes
Question how can collaborative processes make felt the taking form of an event such as Walled Garden, itself a network
Concern how to work with an already existing process (Aenimae – a constellation of thinkers/artists/performers whose mandate it is to find new ways of collaborating/performance within and across networks) to create transversal linkages with a process underway (Walled Garden conference)
Proposition invent techniques for relation that subtly change the fabric of the event by altering the affective tonality of the event at the threshold of perception
SESSION 1, THURSDAY 10.30 – 13.00
Erin Manning and Aenimae come together in the spirit of collaboration. First concern is to set the conceptual stage. Two key concepts are brought forth – thought (via Gilles Deleuze’s Time-Image), relation (via William James’s Essays on Radical Empiricism). Thought is foregrounded here not as the content of an utterance, or an articulation as such. Rather, thought is brought forth as a pre-articulation of what has not yet been thought. As Blanchot writes: “what forces us to think is the impouvoir of thought, the figure of nothingness, then inexistence of a whole which could be thought” (in Deleuze 1987: 168). The question to Walled Garden: how does thought (or the unthought) operate in the relational between that animates the network.
The between that animates the network is relational. In his radical empiricism, James stresses that “the immediately experienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else” (1910: 93). Relation and thought are of the same order – active in the prearticulation of the event’s taking form, actively (if virtually) constitutive of the network’s mode of existence. The proposition: although a vocabulary of networks tends to situate the actual nodes of the networks as its points of determination, the relations/thought of the network are as real as anything else. (note: the virtual is not opposed to real, but to actual)
We begin the workshop with a setting into motion of the kinds of techniques we would like to experiment with during the following day and a half. A consensus develops that we would like to experiment at the threshold of experience rather than at the level of direct intervention. In that way, we believe we might be able to activate nuanced shifts in the ambient affective tonality of the event without bringing our interventions into direct awareness.
Can we develop a technique that will activate the in-between spaces of Walled Garden?
The challenge: 8 separate workshops are taking place within separate spaces in the Lloyd hotel. Each workshop will quickly develop its own connective tissue and see its concerns as central to the event. How can we make felt transversal linkages between groupings?
Key concerns for the first intervention: We should get people to participate in a way that can be open to play, but does not feel acted. There has to be a way for people to be invited into the process without feeling put upon. We would like to give people the opportunity to engage in ways that are risky, without it feeling like a test. The key is to get people into a mode that is inventive without succumbing to the personal. Active in thought, alive in relation, means: without first succumbing to staid parameters such as subject and object, node and trajectory. To intervene at the threshold means working at the threshold, inviting a collaborative process that erupts as an emergent event.
Assumption: most people will take home memories that happen in the non-workshop part. How can we accelerate the process of developing memories of the relational interval? Can we make felt the connective tissue of the event such that the relational interval becomes the force of the event’s taking form? Can some of our techniques affect other workshops by bringing our questions/process into their process, without them being actively aware of it?
Goal: Tweak the environment. Seek affective intervention to slightly changes the mood of an environment. (be tweaked in the process)
Key to developing techniques toward new processes for collaboration (and the creation of new complex networks or nexuses (in Alfred North Whitehead’s vocabulary)) is the harnessing of potential already bubbling at the threshold.
TASK 1 (over lunch): - Find openings of potential and enter into them. - Become aware of your comfort zones. - Act outside these comfort zones. - Make the opening of potential felt and try to carry it forth. - Try to operate transversally (resist subject/object dichotomies, resist the institutional-personal dyad). - Try to meet others at the level of process with a focus not on the content of the diverse workshops but on the kinds of collaborative openings they are calling forth.
SESSION 2, THURSDAY 15.00 – 17.00
Discussion of TASK 1: Max: had two aims. a) aim towards unsavory situations or places, b) to not talk ‘shop’. To create a ‘distorted’ environment he ordered a beer. While that would normally cause a feeling of weirdness, he actually felt quite engaged. He sat down next to someone he wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards and sparked up a conversation. He kept doing this with everyone. People didn’t notice it was deliberate. Very strong awareness of his surroundings.
Emmy: deliberately tried not to say anything, and to only speak to someone when they spoke to her (very unusual behaviour for her in such a situation). Increased sense of connection to her environment, despite strong feeling of unease at times and the sense that she was making people slightly uncomfortable.
Janine: gave herself the assignment to approach someone not just to socialize, but gain something from it. Normally she’s not a typical networked, but she wanted to see what she could get out of it. Felt a strange awareness in/of her environment.
Nuska: usually doesn’t confront people directly. So she tried to keep the conversation open, and be persistent in asking questions, even if the other person would not elaborate on them. Felt a tweak in the mode of relation.
Note on lunch: It was remarkable how quickly groups had settled in by the time we arrived at the various tables. The tables were already populated by the workshop groups and conversation outside of these groups proved difficult for all members of the “relational interval” group. Few of us experienced any kind of opening in the conversation.
The problem of reporting (noted during the plenary): How do you make felt the affective tonality of an event? Description is a paring down of the event into its most translatable aspects. Are there other ways of bringing a process into appearance? Proposition: let’s make TASK 2 a response to the challenges of the plenary.
3 open goals for this workshop:
- Create a sense of engagement as a group - Create a sense of engagement with this event - Develop techniques carry forth process without succumbing to description
Preparation of TASK 2 (for plenary session, day 2): - be attentive to how the relational matrix of Walled Garden is forming. - Remember: events don’t only happen at the nodes of their actualization. They also happen at the intervals. - invent techniques for altering the feeling of spacetime such that the event’s intervals (discontinuities, openings, investments) can be felt. - Homework: Each participant must come up with one technique for the following morning.
General Group Concern: There are so many working group and because of the constraints (time, space etc.) there isn’t much unity. It feels disjointed. How can we break down the walls? Proposition: let’s make Task 3 an intervention on the workshop walls.
SESSION 3, FRIDAY 11.00 – 13.00
TASK 2 (during plenary session):
Discussion: There was a strange acceptance of the status quo. People generally still turned their attention forward to the screen and behaved in “auditorium style” though there were notable exceptions. There remains a strong tendency to be attached to the computer (at least 1/3 of the participants checked email and were only peripherally interested in what was going on around them).
Question: Did this intervention have any effect on the event as a whole?
Observations: - Afterwards no one opted to continue with their task of “reporting” - Bronac noted that although she didn’t register anything going on (i.e., an intervention) it occurred to her she hadn’t walked around the space of the hotel and felt oddly “permitted” to do so - Workshop groups rearranged themselves with people switching workshops and becoming more interested in processes occurring outside their “home” bases
TASK 3 Is there a way to create spacetimes of experience for the Walled Garden event that extend beyond the enclosed rooms of workshop experimentation? Proposition: move into the fabric of the event by observing/engaging with the other work group processes. Problem: how to turn observation into participation? Maybe we can tweak the process underway by infecting it with an opening toward relation? Task: the group cannot just come back and report – they must create a technique for bringing back the process they’ve observed/participated in that is more than a description of it.
SESSION 4, FRIDAY 15.00 – 17.00u.
Everybody went to observe the different workshops.
Nuska: attended Network as Laboratory and moderated their responses, participated in the mapping of ideas, problems that were brought up. They wanted to use her as an outsider, she mixed it with issues/processes from the Relational Interval workshop.
Emmy: attended Aymeric’s workshop. Saw that they had established an actual working group. They had a very specific task. The last two hours they had to come up and present an implemented online environment for a cultural organization. Emmy noticed that immediately there were rules, assigned roles and tools. Was interested in how an infrastructure might presuppose a process.
Proposition for future collaboration and future networks - Make collaboration the process, not the result of the process. - Activate the collective tissue of the event as well as its outcomes. - Develop techniques beyond registering/describing/reporting for making felt the intensity of the taking-form of an event. - Create new forms of distributive practice that affect the web of relations they call forth. - Make networks a practice of aesthetico-political collaboration at the level of thought and relation.
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Notes Relational Intervals |