The snake in paradise seduced Eve to eat a fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge that holds the distinction between good and evil. Why was the tree of knowledge a forbidden tree? Why did the snake seduce Eve? What did the fruit taste like?

When I asked myself why I want to talk about this, I felt like Eve standing in front of the tree, talking to a snake who attempts to seduce me to eat the fruit. Do I want to know? I don't mean knowing about a topic, a trope, or a genre. I mean, on the broadest plane of existence, why do I want to engage on the plane of knowledge? Why do I want to know anything? Wouldn't ignorance be bliss and ultimately let me stay in paradise, let me stay closer to creation? Why do I need to reflect and create a cognitive dissonance between myself and the world? When I see the tree of knowledge and its fruits, why do I have the urge to understand it and not just eat the fruit? But isn't that what the snake is trying to do, to seduce me to enjoy the fruit, to eat it instead of reflecting on it. What exactly is the snake offering?

I think that first, the seduction of the snake is offering a choice. Eve can eat the fruit or contemplate it. Most likely she had been contemplating it for quite some time when the snake came and whispered into her ear to eat the fruit. The contemplation must have been a special one, because everything else in paradise had been there for enjoyment; only that tree, together with the tree of life, was separated from the world of enjoyment by a taboo. That tree of knowledge was not to be enjoyed. I am trying to imagine that, living in paradise and having two trees there that I cannot enjoy. I try to imagine what it might be like to not have eaten from the tree of knowledge, to have remained in the state of ignorance and face, from that plane of existence, a taboo, the unknown, the lush sweet fruits that I can't have. The taboo interferes with and creates a will, a wish, a wanting, and desire. I desire that which I don't have; there is no need to desire what I have, that I can already enjoy. The snake, sitting in that tree, is that desire to know.

But we are still in the paradox world here. Why is that tree in paradise? And why is there a snake? And why can I not just leave it alone? Often this is related to obedience, that God established laws, which were broken by Eve, and therefore suffering came into the world. I am more interested in the epistemological, psychological, and spiritual aspects of that story. Something awakens when the human mind leaves the state of enjoyment and embraces reflection and the desire to break the mirror of reflection to get to a deeper reality. But the key question here is, why is the tree forbidden? And when Eve eats from the tree, why do Adam and Eve realize their nakedness and feel ashamed? And why is there such a drastic punishment that humankind is thrown out of paradise?

I have a physical reaction when I think about these things. My curious, rational mind wants to explore these boundaries, but I am also getting nervous, I feel anxious, my blood pressure goes up. I want to know; I am seduced into that type of thinking, yet my body doesn't feel comfortable. It took me a very long time to acknowledge the relationship between thinking and the subtle signs of the body that indicate how I feel about what I am thinking and how the territory I am entering with my mind feels. Do I feel comfortable there? Is there something for me to find? Do I have to face something there? Is it dark or bright? The snake offering the fruit seduces Eve into a territory that is uncomfortable; she realizes that she is naked and becomes ashamed. She loses her innocence. It is depicted as if this process is not reversible. Were we all born outside of paradise after that? Or do we individually go through that process when we grow up, when we leave the mind of the infant and enter into the rational, reflective mind? For instance, in the mirror stage, when the toddler recognizes himself/herself in the mirror, or when we reach puberty and don't like to be naked in front of others anymore. Once we realize that we are not in paradise, once we realize that the world out there is difficult to comprehend and that the meaning of our existence is even harder to grasp, we try to constitute meaning; we try to make sense.

But in the garden, there was another forbidden tree, the tree of life. Both were in the center of the garden. The serpent seduced Eve into eating from the tree of knowledge, not from the tree of life. And because Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they became like gods, knowing good and evil. Yet God did not want them to eat also from the tree of life to become immortal. He did not trust his own creatures, so he banned them from paradise.

Auro Artworld is organizing a series of 6 lectures at the Centre d'Art multimedia room in Auroville. These lectures, conducted by Dr. Christoph Kluetsch, will explore connections between art, philosophy, and spirituality, bridging Eastern and Western traditions to illuminate the enduring questions of existence, consciousness, and creativity.

The series will be offered on the first Tuesday of every month, beginning on October 1^st.

Tue Oct 1^st 2024 at 5pm: 

Apples and Mangoes: Iconography and the Foundations of Art History

Apples are the fruits of the tree of knowledge in Christian paradise; they symbolize the
world in the hands of kings and are a fruit of poison in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The mango, on the other hand, is a fruit of sweetness and joy. Ganesha received it as a
reward for circumventing Shiva. Creative conversations and gatherings often happen under
the mango tree, which can be found in temples and gardens of enlightenment. The
iconography of these symbolic fruits invites a reflection on key art historical methodologies
by E. Panofsky, H. Wölfflin, and A. Warburg.

Future Lectures

Tue Nov 5^th 2024 - The Principles of Chola Temple Architecture: A Case Study of Irumbai

Tue Dec. 3^rd 2024 - Retinal Art and the Ruins of Representation: Revisiting Plato's Cave and the Notion of Rasa in the Natyashastra

Tue Jan 7^th 2025 - Who is Seeing When Seeing: The Kena Upanishad and the Sensation of Logic

Tue Feb 4^th 2025 - Film is Thought: H. Bergson's Cinematograph and How J. L. Godard Shocks the Viewer into Reality

Tue Mar 4^th 2025 - Reading Deleuze in India: Plane of Immanence, Rhizome, Brahman, and Conversations with AI

Vconnection

For the last two years, I've been immersing myself quite deeply in the Upanishads, practicing some yoga and getting to grips with the System of the Yoga a little. I immersed myself in my own body, my own senses, my own consciousness. I have seen that there are a large number of levels and that there is no reason to assume that there are not even more levels. Two years ago, I had simply denied most of what I was experiencing here. It's nice to know that. The world is much bigger than I always thought, it is much more complex, more colorful, more alive, deeper. And that seems to be just the beginning.

A core idea of the teachings in India is letting go, not wanting to have everything and to desire or rejecttolean back. Simply accepting the world as it is is the great art. Simply enjoying it as it is, even if it is not easy, is bliss. Sinking into meditation and being one with the world. This feeling can also be taken from meditation into everyday life, because we all have to eat.

The basic structureüis indeed something

The exploration of one's own body, one's own consciousness, one's own life energy is systematized in the 24 tattwas. The self, its relationship to Purusha (soul), Prakriti (primal nature), the Buddhi (intellect), the Ahamkara (ego consciousness), Manas (sense-bound thinking) connects the essential cognitive and spiritual levels of experience. However, it remains an experience that stands on its own; it seeks unity with the cosmos, transcends itself beyond itself, yet remains in the same existence. Dvaita-advaita, the duality of duality and non-duality, i.e. a complex idea of immanence, which is supported by pure consciousness, its basis is Brahman, that which we cannot really think, but which is somehow accessible in spiritual experience, even if none of our organs are equipped for it. Only in the synthesis of the senses, in the complex experience of pure (disinterested) enjoyment, the sharpening of the senses, lies a path that is rocky.

The Beautiful in India, however, is that it goes on and on. Having arrived somewhere, the little mind imagines that it has grasped something and can put it into words. But here, almost as if in a dialectical reversal, new levels open up.

Before the 24 tattwas come the 12 tantra tattwas. 5 pure (Śiva: pure consciousness, absolute; Śakti: dynamic energy, power; Sadākhya: ever-present, eternal; Iśvara: supreme lord, ruler; Śuddha Vidyā: pure knowledge, clarity) and 7 semi-clean Tattwas (Māyā: illusion, cosmic veil; Kāla: time, temporal flow; Vidyā: limited knowledge, consciousness; Rāga: attachment, desire, passion; Niyati: cosmic order, destiny; Kalā: creative skill, art; Purusha: individual soul, self), which complement the 24 impure Tattwas. The 24 tattwas comprise the 4 Antahkarana (inner instruments)manas (mind), buddhi (intellect), ahamkara (ego) and chitta (memory or consciousness); the 5 Sensory organs (jñānendriya): ghrāna (nose) for smell, rasana (tongue) for taste, caksus (eye) for sight, tvāk (skin) for touch, śrotra (ear) for hearing; the 5 Organs of action (karmendriya): pāyu (anus) for excretion, upasthā (sexual organ) for procreation and sexual pleasure, pāda (leg) for locomotion, pāni (hand) for grasping and touching, vāk (mouth) for speech; the 5 subtle elements (tanmātra): gandha (smell), rasa (taste), rūpa (form), sparśa (touch), śabda (sound); the 5 rough elements (mahābhuta): prthvi (earth), jala (water), tejas (fire), vāyu (air) and ākāśa (ether or space).

The fascinating thing is that the realization that the world as it presents itself to me in everyday life does not exist (everyone here always says that space and time do not exist) is described with Maya. The world exists, if at all, as will and imagination (Schopenhauer). So when I have recognized this and realize that I aover af I still seem to exist somehow, because after all that is what I am thinking, then there must be another way of seeing the world; the world must be different from what I think, there are possibilities in this world that are different from the ones I know.

I have already come to terms with the fact that time, knowledge, causality, my own existence are fundamentally different, that I cannot trust my senses, that I cannot trust knowledge systems. The logic of the material world is limited to that world, that's okay. It applies there as far as possible. But what about desire? The desire for objects (food, beautiful things, pleasure), or the desire for others? Asceticism can significantly reduce the world of what I desire. I am making good progress by my standards, even if it is hardly noticeable. a big leap can be called, finally I'm sitting here at my computer...

The other, the intersubjective or the unity with a greater consciousness

In the World of Tantra are seeing objects and subjects beyond the veil of Maya and it is possible interacting with them, that is the great art. Magical thinking, occult practices, ecstatic unions, connecting things that are not yet connected, merging, amalgamating, making gold from mercury, dhe secret of tantra is to expand reality and master its fine structure. The great masters can do incredible things, they say. But we can also do a lot on a small scale. For example, when we meet another person and connect with him or her. What actually happens there? The external senses scan each other, an idea of the other person develops, an exchange begins, an attempt is made to understand the other person. And when it becomes magical, when the eyes sparkle and the face smiles, when we lose ourselves in the eyes of the other person, then we immerse ourselves in another reality, in a counterpart. I had learned that we can't look into other people's heads. That seems to me to be fundamentally wrong. I have always had this unease. In moments of deep friendship or falling in love, we can transcend ourselves, form a unity with the other person, unite, merge, form a symbiosis. But it also goes beyond this. Within a community, together with others, our own consciousness becomes part of a larger one. That is probably the danger of sects; if you are not careful, brains are quickly washed and invisible military helmets are put on. What I mean but positive is the spiritual power.

At the moment, I am experiencing this in meditation, which is fed by the certainty of the existence of another. At the moment I wake up at 4 in the morning and meditate. I did this maybe 2-3 times decades ago. These are special moments when the consciousness that comes straight from sleep dives into meditation before the senses have engaged with the world. It is heavy, cumbersome and slow, but also highly sensitized, every nerve becomes perceptible, every little restlessness perceptible and every connection to the outside world perceptible. I realize that I am not alone in the world; the cosmos is there, the sun will rise soon... but also the experience of the other is there, the presence of another person's consciousness, a deep connection, beyond space and time. This kind of connection seems to me to be a tantric one. To perceive this connection, to live it out, to strengthen it and to make it shine through concentration is to ignite the inner light.

The unity of Shiva and Shakti represents this connection. In the everyday world, with my body and social customs, this connection is extremely rare. Many people may not even be aware of it. It is a connection that first happens in reality: drinking coffee together in the afternoon, or getting lost in each other's eyes, experiencing the world and world view together, laughing together or being irritated by honking motorcycles. But also the certainty of the other person's existence, the feeling of closeness despite physical distance, thinking of the other person and being present with them. The levels that connect are not only the material, but also the world of life, the world of consciousness, the spiritual and cosmic experience of the self as part of the great, in which there is also another.

What is the philosophy here in India? Is the deep compassion, the fusion compatible with the realization of Maya? Is the tantric union a spiritual union? I have been asking myself these questions as I have been Ragas and feel myself and the other. Ragas, I am closing the circle a little, are the original form of Indian music and derive from the system of yogas. They are spiritual experience, improvisation at the highest level of mastery; they express how sound, i.e. vibration, is formed in consciousness through concentration and sensual experience and creates that cosmic unity through the body as an instrument. The musical experience, the reflection and meditation, the co-presence of the other, the merging and the creation of a shared reality that creates a new future horizon, are profoundly tantric experiences. You don't have to be a grandmaster to experience this. A little sensitivity is probably enough.

During the Chola empire, the layout of Shiva temples was highly formalized. Based on the Agamas and Shastras, the temple was fully developed into a place in space, time and consciousness where the microcosm and the macrocosm mirror each other.
Studying the Irumbai temple as a smaller temple that follows the strict rules of temple construction and serves as a temple for practitioners shows its central role in a cluster of about two dozen temples in the area. It follows the main principles of Vastu, is aligned along the Vastupurushamandala, has a huge water tank, the usual deities are present, it follows the festival calendar and is aligned with the Murugan star. Even this basic description of the central elements gives us a sense of the temple's placement in the larger cosmic context.
When a temple is built, it is never an arbitrary act. A site is chosen and it must be indicated as favorable. Often an unusually friendly encounter with the animal kingdom is such a good sign. The site must then be tested in terms of soil quality, water, energy, orientation and slopes. A time must be chosen according to the star charts. The stars and planets determine the calendar. Rituals must be performed, construction must begin and invocations must follow. The whole process is an interplay between the cosmos, the physical location and the inner world.

Cosmos

Our existence on this planet is embedded in a solar system, which is embedded in the Milky Way, which in turn is embedded in a cluster of galaxies, and so on. With our eyes we can see many of these elements, their movements and patterns. The recurring cycles of certain light elements in the night sky gave life a reference point. This applies not only to human prehistory, but also to the animal world, such as the flight patterns of birds or howling dogs. This sense of the cosmos following a beautiful, complex rhythm makes us realize that there are forces outside of us that are much greater than the surrounding living world. The sky is the seat of the gods. They look down on us and sometimes interact with us. This is the origin of almost all mythologies. Stars are often associated with gods; they come and go in cycles of days, weeks, months, years, centuries...
If we look at the Earth from a distant cosmic position, we can use it as a reference point in this complex system. We could use any cosmic object as a reference point, but on Earth we are blessed with life and consciousness and have the ability to observe and experience. Therefore, it is a good starting point. Understanding that we can observe the interplay of stars and planets from Earth raises the question of how these constellations affect our little planet. Is there something special about it? Are we alone? Are we a playground for a bigger game?

Tattvas

As soon as I realize that my existence on this planet is endowed with the gift of life and consciousness, I become aware of my body. I realize that the body I inhabit is another level of reality. I can control it, I can use its senses, I have experiences through it, it has needs and supports my experiences and thoughts. This physical body with arms, eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin, hair, legs, feet, hands, organs of pleasure and organs of excretion gives me the inner senses of touch, taste, sight, sound, speech, smell, pleasure, hunger, thirst and pain. The mind is able to synthesize these inner senses: Focus, choice, concentration, structure, thought, meditation, experience and communication. It is the tool that allows us to access higher levels of our existence in terms of spiritual experience. I can experience myself as self; my existence as self is not bound to the physical position of my body. My mind can wander, I can think about things that are present, I have memories, fantasies and imaginations. I can experience myself in relation to others and ask existential questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? Who created me? Where will I go when I die? The blueprint for this world to explore is the system of the 24 Sankhya Tattvas or the 36 Tantra Tattvas. What I have mentioned so far is organized in the Sankhya Tattvas; if we include the realm of higher spirituality, Shiva, Shakti, Purusha, Atma, etc., we are in the 36 Tantra Tattvas.

Elements

When we realize that the cosmos follows a great rhythmic pattern and that our body has access to a very complex system, we can dive deeper and ask what it all consists of. There are five elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Ether and Air. The elements are not to be understood as chemical elements. They are seen as primordial elements with a complex multi-access. Air is in the atmosphere, but it is also the breath of life and holds the power of the wind. Fire is heat and light, knowledge and destruction. Water is liquid, consciousness and the ocean of life. Space is the cosmos, the realm of spirituality, knowledge and sound...

Vibration

Vibration lies at the core of existence. All energy in the macrocosm is ultimately vibration, all life energy is vibration and all elements are vibration. Vibration originates from one point, the bindu. This origin, be it the Big Bang, Shiva's drum or the symbol of the bindu on the forehead, is the point at which everything is held together. This is the origin; it gives us access to the level of immanence. It is beyond what we can experience, beyond science and meditation; it is what we can be aware of but cannot know.

Temple

The extraordinarily complex architecture of temples such as the Chola temples lies in their ability to synthesize all this in one architecture and offer a key to exploring the complexity of our existence. They are designed to be so open that they enable and invite the most diverse forms of spiritual practice. The core of the practice is based on the Vedas. The rituals use symbols from the Vedas to embody wisdom in daily practices.

Visiting a temple regularly creates a deep connection with the cosmic dance in which it is embedded. When thinking about the gods in the Hindu cosmos, it is important to understand that the 300 million, or however many there may be, only superficially represent a polytheistic religion. The underlying thought is that Brahman, the underlying consciousness, reality and creator in its all-encompassing existence, requires the manifestation of that reality to experience itself. Experience is time-based; it has to go through processes and changes and has to go through creation. This is part of everything, and everything is part of everything. If you take something out of everything that is everything, and what remains is everything, and both are everything. We are reaching the limits of our mental capacity here. But from here we must understand that all gods are part of the One; they embody eternal principles, powers, properties, qualities, ideals. Immutable, like the essence of a color perception, an emotion like love, compassion, anger, an ideal like beauty or heroism, or a type like a warrior or a remover of obstacles. These principles are thought of in the form of gods, as the world is a mixture of these principles. I have experiences of these qualities in me; I did not create them; they came together in me. Where do they come from, why do they exist, who created them? In the Upanishads we find a whole hierarchy of gods, one kind building the other kind, level upon level, just like in science we have physical levels, forces, particles and then combinations of these, elements, geology, strata, biology, vegetation, animal life, consciousness. Why should it stop there?

All these elements, if we expand our periodic table of elements, the chemical elements, the tattwas, the pantheon of gods, describe different aspects of our experience. There can be no doubt. The question is whether one is reducible to the other. And I have a feeling that yes, everything is Brahman. The baseline is just a little different. It's not the atom; it's the monad in Western terms. It's not Maya, the illusion of material reality, but consciousness itself. My consciousness is reducible to consciousness; it is the place where everything begins and ends.

Following this description of the extraordinary richness of the world we are given, we experience the coming together of the elements and principles, qualities, attributes, ideals, etc. The image often used is that the gods embodying these elements come to earth to play, to experience themselves, to mingle and interweave, to have fun and laugh, to fight, destroy and build. It is this cosmic dance that Shiva's wheel turns. So if we stay in the image of the cosmic setup, with the stars and planets and the earth at the center as the place where consciousness is present, the descent of the gods is present. They need a place to live and rest, sleep and be accessible. This place is the temple. Looking at a statue of a god in the temple can be a deep contemplation of its qualities. You can connect to the qualities through contemplation. Through contemplation it manifests. You can invite how love is there when you love, or you can try to change. You are suffering, and you seek help by thinking about what might help, and if you think about it long enough, it might manifest. A solution in thinking might come, an emotion might transform, but maybe even something in the world changes. You leave the place of contemplation, return to so-called reality and something has happened. How, I don't know, but what is so absurd about it? This is the core of tantra. By changing your inner world, you can change the outer world, just as the outer world changes the inner world.

The temple follows a calendar of festivals. Great mystical transformations are celebrated during the festivals. The qualities of the gods are evoked through elaborate puja rituals. They are seen as manifested in the bronze statues that are ceremonially carried through the temple. One god is placed in front of another god so that they can see each other, greet each other. But only after they have been gently awakened, bathed, worshipped and fed with sensory impressions such as the smell and taste of fruits and flowers. It is a celebration of joy because we can witness the presence of joy. Millennia of celebration echo off the stone walls that have absorbed the sound and rhythms. The stones have stored the memory of the feet that have walked over them, and statues have collected the millions of touches of the faithful.

The womb chamber, the Garbha Griha, plays a key role. The main deity resides here and only the priest can have direct contact. The priest takes care of the god, wakes him or her up and puts them to bed. Washing is done privately; a curtain is drawn during this time. The offerings of the faithful are later accepted by the priest and passed on to the god by touch. Flowers are placed on the body, scents are lit, mantras are recited. Ultimately, it boils down to the synthesis of sensory impressions through vibration. All vibrations radiate from the womb chamber and are able to mix and integrate the offerings. A connection is made between the pure qualities as celestial entities, their embodiment in the temple, the rituals of the priest, the devotion of the worshippers, the history and memory of the place and the cycle in which everything is embedded.

When I read a book, watch a movie, immerse myself in a painting or take part in a performance, what exactly is happening? I am experiencing something, images, feelings and experiences are awakened in me. Imagine a movie, a book, a play or a painting that is about human relationships, action, history or fairy tales. So you're sitting somewhere looking at something that tells some kind of story. Now, what's the difference between looking at a story and contemplating, say, looking at the bottom of a clear, living lake where fish and plants, stones and sun reflections invite you to contemplate the universe? Is it not the case that one thing, art created by another person, tells one story, and nature, created quite differently, tells a different story? One difference seems to be time. In art, the artist can shape space and time, the narrative can jump, the space can change through a cut, one feeling can change to another without a transition. The colorful hustle and bustle of the cosmos, which tells its story, takes place for us in a space-time continuum. We can move faster or slower within it, we can fly or walk slowly, but we cannot change time.

What we can do, however, is use our memory, our mind and our perception to focus on various elements from our environment and link them together in our consciousness. This world of experience makes up our waking consciousness and sometimes also our dream consciousness. We bring a consciousness with us into the world.

Now we already have a whole host of different roles here: a person who experiences the world as an observer, an artist who expresses his experience and makes it tangible for others, and the world itself, which in its expansion in space and time provides the basis for those experiences. We can make direct contact with the world, reflect on it and inquire into its deeper meaning. We can try to establish a connection to what holds the world together within, i.e. to experience a principle, a force, an origin that goes beyond that of which I am a part. This going beyond is now to be regarded with a little caution, as it immediately raises the question of duality. Is something beyond that of which I am a part, or is the whole of which I am a part, in the form of immanence, the whole that is thought of as such as transcendent, but is not?

The question of duality is important here, because from here we can ask what the role of art really is. Is art something that creates a kind of world that the viewer can immerse themselves in, as something that is different, that confronts me, an illusion, a representation, a simulation? Or is art part of the world in the sense that the consciousness that created it has expressed something that each of us can experience, at least structurally? And what makes art special here is the possibility of expressing it in a medium that is independent of the artist's consciousness.

That's quite amazing. There are different ways of thinking about it. I can understand art as a system of signs, i.e. I can look at it semiotically, like a language. I identify elements of the artwork and bring them before my inner eye in the form of linguistic or semiotic structures of consciousness - be it visual, auditory, gustatory, physical or olfactory - depending on which is the dominant medium here. So I can say: "I see or hear or taste x." This x, if previously perceived similarly by an artist, would be the content of the work. Most art theories stop here and now concentrate on the formal elements of x. Is x interesting, new, surprising, provocative, emotional, etc.?

However, the underlying principle here is consciousness itself. Consciousness experiences, creates and shares. The world itself unfolds in the work of art in a very special way. The work of art offers us the opportunity to reflect on the experience of the world itself and to understand it in the experience itself as sublime, as bliss, as transcendent. When it comes to art that critically engages with reality and shows us what is not going well, where there is suffering and injustice, this may be more difficult to accept, but qualitatively it also remains that experience.

In India, this is referred to as rasa, literally taste. However, it denotes precisely the experience that is shared between artist and audience through expression, but which at its core refers to the general consciousness, the immanence, Brahman. Art is thus essentially not merely anchored in the material world and the world of the living, of knowledge and the intellect, but reaches into the realm of the contemplative, the meditative. It is part of Satchitananda.

I realize that I have become tired of looking at art in purely formal terms. That misses the point of art and even the point of our existence. Art is merely a form of expression that Brahman has given itself. Art is immanent, it is a knot that connects different things and creates lines on a material basis, the work. The experience of it is different for everyone, so talking and writing about it only makes sense up to a certain point. What you can't talk about, you should keep quiet about. But that doesn't mean that there is nothing there. On the contrary, this is where it gets really interesting.

(this is an old text of mine, found in the archives. It is strange to read it again, as it shows to me how desperately I tried to get out of the trap of representation and the urge to embrace a philosophy of immanence. I went through so many ideas, looked at so many artists - I never did anything with the text, as my self-critical voice didn't consider it to be any good. I have to say I like it better now. It is a bit convoluted, sometime there are some jumps, but it gave me a platform to leave the western canon and to finally go to India. I was writing on that text while I was teaching in the USA, and before I went to India for the first time in 2016. I now realize why a part of me stayed in India and never came back, calling me for years, until I moved here. )

"This is the dark thought I have had about representation for so long: we are immersed in it and it has become inseparable from our condition. It has created a world, a cosmos even, of false problems such that we have lost our true freedom: that of invention."-Dorothea Olkowski, Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation

Two positions on Deleuze aesthetics

If we compare two prominent approaches to a Deleuzian aesthetics - one by Daniel W. Smith, the translator of Deleuze's Francis Bacon book and the other by Jacques Rancière - we gain insight into one of the central problems of aesthetics in a Deleuze's philosophy. Daniel W. Smith in his introduction to the Deleuze's Francis Bacon book said that Deleuze "suggests that there are two general routes through which modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a "sensation" directly: either by moving toward abstraction, or by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural. An abstract art like that of Mondrian or Kandinsky, though it rejected classical figuration, in effect reduced sensation to a purely optical code that addressed itself primarily to the eye "[1] Jacques Rancière in contrast discusses a Deleuzian Aesthetics starting with two Deleuzian 'formulations': ""The first statement is found in What is Philosophy?: "The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself. . . . The artist creates blocks of percepts and affects, but the only law of creation is that the compound must stand up on its own." The second appears in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: "With painting, hysteria becomes art. Or rather, with the painter, hysteria becomes painting.""[2] It seems as if we have four proposals for an aesthetic theory on hands:

• modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a "sensation" directly by moving toward abstraction
• modern painting escaped the clichés of representation and attempted to attain a "sensation" directly by moving toward what Lyotard has termed the figural
• The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself
• With painting, hysteria becomes art. Or rather, with the painter, hysteria becomes painting

Although Smith talks about modern art while Rancière quotes Deleuze on art in general, they both state a dichotomy: art is either self-sufficient and abstract, or move toward something that Lyotard calls figural: a nonrepresentational figure which through its power of recognition without representation gives us access to sensation. To unpack that riddle, it is helpful to look at how Deleuze can be understood as a philosopher of immanence who rejects transcendental concepts of subjectivity.

Deleuze in context

One of the many distinctions in the history of thought opposition between a subject-object dualism operating ultimately on a concept of transcendence, on the one hand, and thought of immanence on the other hand. This opposition itself is, off course, a dualism. The dilemmas for both sides are equally unsatisfactory. While dualism has to explain how two essentially different forms of existence can interact within a consistent system of non-contradictory forces, immanence has to explain how self-awareness is possible. It is Alfred N. Whitehead who identified within this puzzle the notion of process as one that covers the scientific as well as the spiritual aspect of reality. He stands of course in a long tradition of thought that spans diverse school of thoughts from Buddhism, to Heraclitus, through Nietzsche and Bergson to post-human thought.[3]

William James for instance, made a distinction between though minded and soft minded philosophers. He vehemently rejects the soft-minded, the rationalist, idealistic religious thinkers of the absolute. He rather favors the empiricist sensualistic, fact oriented philosophers who can stand the contradiction, the multitude. It is no surprise that he influences Deleuze, and that Whitehead identifies him as one of the four influential philosophers of the western tradition: Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz and James. James pragmatism, which bases truth within the methodology of questioning everything in regards of how useful it is to us. He is in close aliens with Henri Bergson, who anchors consciousness and memory in usefulness. While pragmatism similar to vitalism overcomes idealism and rationalism, it is still human centered. Deleuze pushes these boundaries beyond the human. What does something mean for something else? What is a stone for the tree? How can we think being a tree? In the West there is a tendency to describe our body as equipped with fife senses: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting, in the Buddhist tradition there are six sense organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. For the West, the mind synthesizes fife senses through abstraction[4]for the Far East the mind is just another sense as well as the body is. This difference should be an invitation to revisit what we call sensation. Sensation is sometimes perceived as deceptive (i.e. scepticism) or as sinful (i.e. purism), mostly input for a brain, following a mechanical machine metaphor. During the interview with Claire Parnet "Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer" (1996), which was released posthumously, at the very end Deleuze talks about the wisdom of Zen.

Immanence, life and art

Gilles Deleuze is the latest great thinker of immanence. His ideas of the fold and the rhizome are aiming to address the very fundamental problems of philosophy. The fold is designed to explain self-awareness[5]; the rhizome guarantees the consistency of reality through endless connectivity. Deleuze's philosophy develops an alternative to a subject-object dualism. This alternative needs to understand the idea of a subject in a radically different way. A subject is no longer an irreducible kernel of human existence, but a configuration of connected machines. The body-machine is connected with the subject-machine, and let's say a painting machine - where "machine" does not necessarily mean robotic constructions. Rather, "A machine may be defined as a system of interruptions or breaks."[6] Furthermore every machine has a code built in[7]. This understanding of world as connected machines with build in codes which control interruptions offers one possible departing point to engage immanence. The continuous folding of time (memory) and space (Escher) in mathematics and in physics, in computation and biology (DNA) is an act of creativity within the plane of immanence.

It is not very difficult to find evidence of immanence within experience. We only need to state the obvious, for example: we live. Life is the most fundamental of our experiences, it is also the most evident fact; we can very easily make a distinction between life and death. We feel it, and we fight for it. We protect life and sometimes even insure it; we share it, prolong it, and take it away. The only thing we don't do with it is to include it within science. We analyze instead the dead, solid object. Henri Bergson moved life, i.e. Élan vital, in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, into the center of his philosophy. Gilles Deleuze calls pure immanence "A life". Artists like Kandinsky searched for life within art. Art history at the beginning of the 20th century^th century focused on formalistic analysis and the subordination of art under scientific theory. Art historians looked at art as a solid object although many avant-garde movements tried to achieve the opposite - capturing movement, time, change, chance, sub consciousness etc.. But we should remember that looking at art is foremost 'looking', that is, connecting the eye with i.e. a painting. The connection is in the center of Deleuze analysis of the painting of Francis Bacon[8]. How does the subject-machine connect with the painting-machine? Which parts of the body are affected when we look at a painting? How is the response of the nervous system related to our thinking? How do we get from percept to concept to affect and vice versa?

Becoming machine: In Kafka's MetamorphosisSamsa becomes an insect, in Machine-human, (2006) Christopher Rhomberg and Tobias Zucali transform the human into an extension of a machine, the human "becomes" a machine, in the Telegarden, Ken Goldberg extends our gardening into tele-gardening, he investigates a tele-epistemology and we become an exo-brain, Stelarc becomes a cyborg and merges with exoskeletons, LSD test-persons in the 60's became open interactive systems. ("From endosensation to exosensation."[9]) When the subject-machine connects with other machines, they form a rhizome. Yoshimasa Kato & Yuichi Ito's, White Lives on Speakers, Brain-driven Aesthetic Environment 2007, let the human's thoughts physically manifest. Orlan physically becomes the incarnation of beauty. Time-based media are always in the process of becoming. On the other hand, in the paintings of Francis Bacon, Deleuze describes the becoming of animal and woman. But we must not understand the "becoming" of an animal in Bacon's work as a representation of becoming animal, rather, the becoming is taking place within sensation. The logic of sensation follows the structure of becoming, rhizome, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization[10]. The elements in the canvas unfold their logic and invite the viewer, who sees and doesn't gaze, to become different strata of his/her becoming. S/he can become mineral or animal, zoon politicon or homo faber.

"The logic of sensation" was a "Commissioned text based on a year's seminar (1979-80)"[11] It was written in the spirit of the 70's in France: writing with and against Marxism, the figurative gained a new significance. Overcoming abstract expressionism, American pop culture, and the LSD impregnated, cybernetic 60's, the figure re-emerged in painting.[12] But instead of following the kitschy propaganda of leftist painting, Deleuze was interested in the plane of consistency. He rejected Althusser's materialistic notion of encounter as aleatory and contingent and offered the notion of immanence, opposing transcendence, but not in a reductionist materialistic manner. The canvas is not a sheet for signs, but a plane of events. As an anti-narrative it contains encounters, which are based in process philosophy, a la Whitehead, and the perception of change, a la Bergson[13].

The 'medium' becomes a plane of thought, not as a McLuhan-esque extension, but as an 'autonomous' container of thought. Following the image of thought of a rhizome, connections develop, encounters happen, and events lead to new events. The connections are not necessarily causal. Schopenhauer pointed out the fourfold root of the principle of causality[14]; Bergson goes deeper into the "process" characteristics of reality, and divides "becoming" into qualitative, evolutionary and extensive movement. If we leave transcendence behind and anchor thought on the plane of immanence, it is here where it rhizomatic connects, and it can be best described as becoming, change, and an event. It is also here where complex fields are constituted, and where intensity and disruption characterize the visual elements of art. "This means that there are no sensations of different orders, but different orders of one and the same sensation."[15] How then is the sensation structured? How does sensation operate on a non-signifying stratum? Deleuze rejects three traditional attempts to explain the phenomenon of sensation[16]: first, he rejects the unity of the represented object; second, he identifies the confusion between sensation with feeling; and third, he recognizes the misunderstanding is in the perception of movement - movement comes from sensation and is not prior to it.

"Painting gives us eyes all over: in the ear, in the stomach, in the lungs (the painting breathes...). This is the double definition of painting: subjectively, it invests the eye, which ceases to be organic in order to become a polyvalent and transitory organ; objectively it brings before us the reality of a body, of lines and colors freed from organic representation. And each is produced by the other: the pure presence of the body becomes visible at the same time that the eye becomes the destined organ of this presence." (p.45)

Deleuze understands painting primarily as being purely visual, and how could it not be visual?[17] He thus reanimates painting from death, through theory. Painting is not a sign that needs to be understood intertextually. That is what text is for.[18] Deleuze focuses on the affect which painting has on the bwo, i.e. the virtual body with all its potentials. The eye is sliding over the surface, it becomes the color and light, the form and texture, the shape and figure, it brings before us the reality of painting, not as representation, but as an object that affects the bwo. The affect follows the logic of sensation; the constitution of 'meaning' is immanent in the subject-machine and painting-machine. Deleuze reminds us that we need to SEE when we encounter painting, seeing in the form of a connection, where the nerve systems is affected; the "seeing" of seeing. "Avoid the figurative, illustrative, and narrative," (p.6) Deleuze serves as a model for radical immanent thinking about art. The radicalism does not lie in the superimposed ideology of certain art works, but in an immanent understanding of its rhizomatic process.

This matter is the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified or destratified body of the earth with all its follows of subatomic and submolecular particles. Deleuze and Guattari call it the plane of consistency, the body without organs - that is, the body of the earth, of protoplasm, even of human life that is not subject to an organizing principle, to a sign, to a force that orders it.[19]

The traditional understanding of painting is that of a medium of communication, i.e. the artist communicates something through the painting, to the viewer, who needs to decode it. Art history helps that process of decoding by revealing additional information. The mechanism of painting is one which uses a multitude of tools to achieve this communication: representation, resemblance, perspective, narrative, abstraction, etc.[20] Deleuze, in contrast, has an understanding of painting that radically rejects these notions. The painting is something the eye connects with. The eye can become ears, and stomach a.o. The nervous system, which is affected by the painting, connects the painter with the painting and the viewer. (I will later explain the underlining ontology of images a la Bergson.) Although the viewer is not a person, painting does not allow for the presence of the viewer, but for the connection with a bwo. What constitutes a painting then is: rhythm, coupling, forces, color, hysteria, and becoming. The logic of sensation explores these mechanics, the rhizome connections. The logic of sensation is prior to philosophy and anchored in the plane of immanence.

Music is a prime example for pure sensation: an acoustic event, i.e. a performance of music using different kinds of instruments played by one or more musicians, is sensed by the audience as well as the musicians. The musicians produce a complex sound pattern, tin which sound waves superpose. The active participation of the music performance as a musician is the constant transformation of the complex sound pattern. It involves memory and potentials. The remembrance of the heard and the expectation of the to come from the present experience. Based on the memory and the potential, the performance is an actualization of a sensational event. But how is the brain affected? The complex sound pattern reaches the listener's ears. That pattern is deconstructed into a rhizomatic organization of waves. The identification of different instruments, of melodies and rhythm is based on the succession of one complex frequency, which lets the eardrum resonate. Only through the awareness of the past and the future sound becomes music, as pure presence sound is nothing but noise. Similarly, we compose complex visual sensations, smells and haptic experiences. Looking at a painting is a process. The viewer starts somewhere, directs the eyes somewhere else, remembers the just seen and actualizes the potential of the present sensation. The time span of the present (Husserl called said that retention and protention always accompany the present) allows for affection and seld-affection. Unconsciously, a present sensation triggers past sensations and reflex action as potentials. On a conscious level we are aware of the past (memory) and the future (potential). In a self-conscious state we are aware of the present being intrinsically interwoven with past and future.

Within the plane of immanence, the notion of aesthetic experience vanishes. It is not a subject that has aesthetic experiences of, let's say, beauty and ugliness, or harmony. And is certainly not representation that gives a subject an aesthetic experience. That was three transcendental concepts in one sentence. The plane of immanence, or 'A life' as Deleuze calls it, produces 'a subject'[21]. Of course, there are subjects who look at representational art and have aesthetic experiences, but this description of reality is a highly constructed one, it is embedded in sociopolitical and cultural, as well as religious constructs. It reinforces existing structures or clichés. For art to have the disruptive force which is not only claimed by Deleuze, but a very common request throughout modernity, it needs to descend onto the plane of immanence, and extend the rhizome. Immanence is ant-dialectical and does not refer to a false consciousness.

Deleuze is using Bacon's paintings to show that painting was always abstract. How Bacon treats force, shape, color, material, rhythm, coupling etc. exemplifies how the painterly elements were at work at all times. We need to look beyond the narrative of figurative painting to understand painting.

Kandinsky and cosmic laws

When Kandinsky turned his back on representation, two ontological realms became accessible-the inner (spiritual, emotional, psychological, and sensual) and the abstract (formal, mathematical, and physical). For both realms we claim laws. A vast variety of modern aesthetic theories stem from here in such fields as empirical psychology, information aesthetics, gestalt theory and phenomenology. These laws seem to be complex and we are far from a proper understanding of them as of yet. What our attempts of uncovering the underlying laws have in common is a focus on processes, rather than objects.

At the beginning of the 20^th century, both tendencies were strongly developed. Within the European Avant-garde movements, a vitalist philosophy competed against a materialistic machine aesthetic. In 1936-the year Konrad Zuse built the first computer named the Z1-Alfred Barr published his famous diagram Cubism and Abstract Art. For the year 1909 Barr had identified "machine esthetic" as a central notion, which influenced everything but (abstract) expressionism. It took nearly 30 years (mid-60s) before computer artists finally emerged. Although they were usually trained as engineers rather than artists, they represented a new breed of experimentalists boarder-crossing between art and science-much like the Renaissance men who fixed the problem of C.P. Snow's "two cultures". But until today it seemed that these two cultures were not bridged[22].

It is with 1960s computer art that the materialistic side of that cultural division tried to bridge the gap through artificial intelligence. The approaches taken in the aftermath of WWII differed significantly around the world. In the USA, we find an empirical approach that is praxis-oriented and stemming from industrial laboratories. On the other side (in Europe), their approaches were inspired by philosophy and psychology, born in university computer labs and theoretical, mathematical and political in nature. In 1965 at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, Michael Noll exposed Piet Mondrian's work to a "Turing-Art test". The question was straightforward: Can a computer generate art that would be considered equal to man-made (by Mondrian) art? At the same time in Tokyo, the Computer Technique Group (CTG) explored early concepts of robotic art production. And in Stuttgart (Germany), Max Bense inspired his students to apply his Information Aesthetic to the computer. In Bense's "manifesto" of computer art he declares:

Generative aesthetics therefore implies a combination of all operations, rules and theorems, which can be used deliberately to produce aesthetic states (both distributions and configurations) when applied to a set of material elements. Hence generative aesthetics is analogous to generative grammar, in so far as it helps to formulate the principles of a grammatical schema-realizations of an aesthetic structure.[23]

This quote poses several questions, which include: How does an artist interact with a plane? How do marks form symbols? When is the certain distribution of visual elements considered to be aesthetic or art? Can we investigate this process to the extent that we can formalize it? And if formalized, would it be possible to transfer it to machines?[24]

In 1954, Max Bense was invited to teach "information" at the Ulm School of Design by his friend and concrete artist Max Bill. Bill was also one of Kandinsky's students at the Bauhaus and during that time he worked on the introduction for the third German edition of Kandinsky's Point and line to surface, or Point and Line to Plane. In Point and Line to Plane (first published in German in 1926 during Kandinsky's Bauhaus period from 1922 to 1933), Kandinsky speaks of grammatical structures, numerical terms and a future science for aesthetics:

The multiplicity and complexity in expression of the "smallest" form attained, after all, by slight changes in its size, serve to the receptive mind as a plausible example of the power and depth of expression of abstract forms. Upon further development of this means of expression in the future, and further development of the receptivity of the observer, more precise concepts will be necessary, and these will surely, in time, be attained through measurement. Expression in numerical terms will be indispensible here.[25]

The relationship between Kandinsky's call for measurement and early computer art has been addressed numerous times by art historians. Max Imdahl[26] contrasted Bense's aesthetic with Kandinsky. Cumhur Erkut pointed out the parallels between computer art and Kandinsky[27]. Computer artist Joseph H. Stiegler[28] sees Kandinsky as a forerunner of computer art. And Frieder Nake refers to Kandinsky's notion of an inner necessity[29]. But being interviewed by Nierendorf in 1937, Kandinsky answered his question whether abstract art has no longer a connection to nature:

No! And no again! Abstract painting leaves behind the "skin" of nature, but not its laws. Let me use the "big words" cosmic laws. Art can only be great if it relates directly to cosmic laws and is subordinated to them. One senses these laws unconsciously if one approaches nature not outwardly, but-inwardly. One must be able not merely to see nature, but to experience it. As you see, this has nothing to do with using "objects." Absolutely nothing![30]

Here Kandinsky vehemently opposed a naïve form of materialism. While Kandinsky searched in Munich for a connection with the inner nature in The Spiritual in Art (1911), Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure held his Third Course of Lectures in General Linguistics (1910-1911) in Geneva, and French philosopher of vitalism and immanence Henri Bergson said in his lecture The Perception of Change given at Oxford (1911):

My present, at this moment, is the sentence I am pronouncing. But it is so because I want to limit the field of my attention to my sentence. This attention is something that can be made longer or shorter, like the interval between the two points of a compass. For the moment, the points are just far enough apart to reach from the beginning to the end of my sentence; but if the fancy took me to spread them further my present would embrace, in addition to my last sentence, the one that preceded it: all I should have had to do is to adopt another punctuation.[31]

At this point, it is interesting how Bergson treats the punctuation as a means to extend attention. Roman and medieval Latin, for instance, do not know the punctuation as a closure for sentences. The sentence full stop is a rather modern invention. How was it to read and write without full stops and punctuation?

I do not want to suggest that Kandinsky is directly responding to the quoted paragraph by Bergson, but Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a contemporary to Henri Bergson (1859-1941). In 1913, Max Scheler announced the Bergson reception in Germany-which had elements of hype-must be overcome.[32] Hilary Fink (1999) gives an overview of the relationship between the two in Bergson and Russian Modernism (1900-1930).[33] She claims that during the 20s and 30s of the 20^th century almost all intellectuals in Russia were acquainted with the basic ideas of Bergson's books Introduction to Metaphysics (1903) and Creative Evolution (1907).

Through Bergson, we can get a better understanding of Kandinsky's remarkable extraction of the point from the sentence "Today I am going to the movies" at the beginning of Point and Line to Plane. He continues with:

Today I am going to the cinema.

Today I am going. To the cinema

Today I. am going to the cinema

. Today I am going to the cinema

Kandinsky leaves us with the form of a written sentence of pre-modern times without a full stop and an isolated graphical element-or a point-that is now freed to gain other meanings. In Little Articles on Big Questions (1919), Kandinsky describes how our "accustomed eye responds dispassionately to punctuation marks,"[34] that "outer expediency and practical significance of the entire world around us have concealed the essence of what we see and hear behind a thick veil," and that "This thick veil hides the inexhaustible material of art."[35] Kandinsky goes on by saying "In these few lines I shall dwell only upon one of these beings, which in its tiny dimensions approaches 'nothing,' but has a powerful living force-the point."[36] Kandinsky's description of the geometrical point as "union of silence and speech" identifies punctuation as a zero gravity center from which meaning is constructed. The pauses between words are as important as the chain of words itself. The point "belongs to language and signifies silence." Furthermore:

In doing so, I abstract the point from its usual conditions of life. It has become not only not expedient, but also unpractical, nonsensical. It has begun to break through the conventions of its existence; it is on the threshold of an independent life, an independent destiny. The thick veil has been rent from top to bottom. The astounded ear perceives an unfamiliar sound, the new utterance of what once seemed a speechless being.[37]

And finally Kandinsky says, "farewell to the now insane punctuation mark and sees before him a graphic and painterly sign. The point, liberated from its coercive destiny, has become the citizen of a new world of art."[38] Kandinsky extracts what is called in science a "primitive notion point" from architecture, dance, music, woodcut, etc.. The point is an element that appears in all kinds of artistic media. It is remarkable that Kandinsky extracts the point only from artistic media and not from everyday objects or phenomena. The point is thus derived from art-not from nature or science-and it is an element of the human spirit.

Interpreting Kandinsky:

Bergson speaks of a contraction as one of the five senses of subjectivity.[39] "As we shall endeavor to show, even the subjectivity of sensible qualities consists above all else in a kind of contraction of the real, effected by our memory."[40] That contraction-where the distance between perceived object and brain is zero-is the point where affection arises, subjectivity and personality is established, and perception and memory are connected. Very much like Kandinsky, the point is thus a key element that needs to be exposed to a force. When a point is moved it leaves a trace in memory. When it is drawn or danced, sound and molded it becomes a line.

To extract the point from written language, and to introduce it into painting as a formal element, is radical in its intermedia approach-a term coined in the 60s by Dick Higgins in relation to poetry (1966). During the 60s, Gene Youngblood developed the concept of expanded cinema (1970) and Bense postulated generative aesthetics (1965). The 60s were dominated by a strong tension-on one hand there was the scientific, cybernetic, sociological and system-based theory, and on the other hand there was the expanded-consciousness, hippy culture and flower power, radical exploration of processes in art and intermedia. Like no other period, the 60s also stood for conceptualism. Computer art was born from mathematics and pure concepts. As a poet, Kandinsky anticipated central ideas of the 60s, when he extracted the point from a sentence about the cinema to find a precise numerical law for art. Kandinsky's compositions follow an inner logic. This logic unfolds on the canvas, follows color theory and geometry, and is born in the painter's mind. The canvas, the theory and the mind are interwoven. This web inspired early computer graphic artists. It-at least in theory-translated easily into the cybernetic circles and flow chart architecture of the mainframe computing age.

But it is Gilles Deleuze in his Logic of Sensationwho anchors this web deeper within sensation.[41] He redefines notions like machinic, virtual and digital and explores the triad of concept, affect and percept as constitutive for an extended notion of subjectivity. This subjectivity stands in opposition to a metaphysical cogito. It rather engages in forms of deterritorialization and connects with or becomes a body without organs (or a stratified world). Art for him is an encounter, or a connection between art-machines and subject machines.[42] The connection is rhizomatic. Art begets the viewer to become its matter. In relation to Kandinsky's treatment of the point, the subject-machine explores the transition of becoming. In the shift of events, the point comes into existence on the picture plane and is set in motion. The moment of coming into existence on a picture plane resembles the formation of subjectivity, or "A life", in the plane of immanence.[43]

Kandinsky's extraction of the point at the beginning of his central Bauhaus publication stands in stark contrast to Paul Klee's deduction of the point at the beginning of his Form and design theory during his Bauhaus period 1920-31.[44] For Klee, the point is gray because it is neither black nor white, and yet black and white at the same time. It is neither at the top nor at the bottom, and yet both at the same time. It is un-dimensional. For Klee, the elevation of the point to a central "Gestaltung" (shaping) is a cosmos-genetic. And thus, the point resembles the egg.[45] While for Klee the analogy to life-in particular the cell structure of eggs-is very explicit on the following pages in his book and the connection to life in Kandinsky's book is less literal. Michel Henry describes that process as follows:

Yet, if the point is situated in its place in a written text and plays its normal role, it is accompanied by a resonance that one might call its resonance in writing. Its displacement within the sentence and then outside of the sentence in an empty space produces a double effect: the writing-resonance of the point diminishes, while the resonance of its pure form increases. At any rate, these two tonalities have appeared now where there was only one, two modalities of invisible life within us when there was one single objective form in the world and there still only is one point before us. The radical and now undeniable dissociation of the external and internal elements of painting occurs through the invincible force of essential analysis, if, as in the course of the experiment that we just carried out, it is the case that the external remains numerically one while the internal is duplicated and has become a "double sound".[46]

Michel Henry's interpretation of Kandinsky focuses on the notion of life. As a philosopher of radical phenomenology, he aims to overcome the epoché of the world by reaching into its internal force, or life. In the tradition of philosophers who search for inner forces such as will (Schopenhauer), power (Nietzsche) and spirit (Hegel), Henry has the closest resemblance to Bergson (élan vital) and Deleuze (Plane of Immanence / A life). While Henry shares a strong grounding in Christianity with Kandinsky, this common root is not essential for the current analysis of Kandinsky.[47] For Henry, Kandinsky's search for interiority can be described in the following equation: "Interior = interiority = invisible = life = pathos = abstract."[48] When an artist, or art for that matter, looks inward it creates an inner space in which that which is invisible is about to be made visible. At the same time, that which is invisible is governed by forces of life. In an auto-affection (pathos) it becomes consciousness and can be express abstractly. Henry has two seemingly mad ideas:

1. The content of painting, of all paintings, is the Internal, the invisible life that does not cease to be invisible and remains forever in the Dark, and 2. the means by which it expresses this invisible content-forms and colors are themselves invisible, in their original reality and true sense, at any rate. [49]

Thus, the invisible life as auto-affect pathos, that as underlying forces is prior to subjectivation, establishes the resonance and rhythm between the picture plane and the interior of the world. It is through the notion of life that Henry sees the connection between the seen and the seeing, between the internal and external. It is his answer to the question of how the pre-established harmony between mind and world can be explained.

Double sound

What is interesting in the above mentioned quote by Henry is the 'double sound'. According to Deleuze, Foucault was always "haunted" by the double, for him "the double is never a projection of the interior," but "an interiorization of the outside." We can see that in Rene Magritte's painting "The Treachery of Images" from 1928. An image of a pipe and a sentence "C'est ci n'est pas une pipe" are set next to each other on a canvas. How do they relate? What do we learn from a sentence that truthfully claims that the representation is not the represented? According to Deleuze, we learn from Foucault's analysis of that riddle, about the shift from phenomenology to epistemology. Neither the statement "C'est ci n'est pas une pipe", nor the visual representation, actually refers to an outside. They stay within the realm of knowledge. Deleuze goes further by saying that "when we see a pipe we shall always say (in one way or another): "this is not a pipe" as though intentionality denied itself."[50] But if we lose the connection to the outside world because of the rejection of intentionality, how can we re-establish it? Foucault says, "Kandinsky delivered painting from this equivalence: not that he dissociated its terms, but because he simultaneously got rid of resemblance and representative functioning."[51]

And how can that delivery be achieved? Lyotard identifies rhythm as a central joint:

"This is how what is given one by one, blow by blow, or, as Bergson puts it, 'shock' [ébranlement] by shock, in the amnesiac material point, is retracted', condensed as though into a single high-frequency vibration, in perception aided by memory. The relevant difference between mind and matter is one of rhythm."[52]

For Deleuze, the shock of film and the replacement of the figural through the figure (Bacon), or the code through the diagram marks the transition from representational (perspective) thinking, to a structuralist - process based thinking. While the mechanics of that transition have to be spelled out, the results are sensible in a rapidly expanding virtuality beyond the individual experience. "Seeing, and more generally sensation, then becomes "experimental" just when it thus, encounters or presents something "unrepresentable," even "inhuman," prior to code or discourse" [53]

We need to learn to "see" events in art, and not just in process art. When Whitehead introduced his process philosophy the same year Heidegger published Time and Being, we had an alternative as to how we proceed in the 20^th century[54]. Until Deleuze reintroduced the philosophy of Whitehead and Bergson,[55] and its application to painting (Bacon) and film (movement-image), Whitehead's heritage had been neglected. The radical shift toward processes (Whitehead) and becoming (Bergson), as operating ontologically, primarily to substances and the subject-object dualism, offers a deeper understanding of the potential of encounters through art. Through the technological treatment of time: recording, projecting, feedback, computation, simulation, and animation, we are able to reflect on the special and timely conditions of art. Here the machine enters the 'plane of immanence,' that layer of reality that exists prior to subjectivity, which structure intertwined with perception images, representations of world, and the non-human eye. Dziga Vertov's non-human eye - introduced by Henri Bergson's cinematograph -and the central metaphor for Deleuze's, cinema 1 book, has an equivalent in the computer. Its laws are non-optical, but operate with internal images, their description are mathematical, precise, and machine driven. The camera eye and the computer, as well as the plane of immanence, collide in Deleuze's notion of the machine and the rhizome. We now have the tools to understand the full impact of the marginal mentioning of Kandinsky in Deleuze's Logic of Sensation:

"Abstract optical space has no need of the tactile connections that classical representation was still organizing. But it follows that what abstract painting elaborates is less a diagram than a symbolic code, on the basis of great formal oppositions. It replaced the diagram with a code. This code is "digital," not in the sense of the manual, but in the sense of a finger that counts. "Digits" are the units that group together visually the terms in opposition. Thus, according to Kandinsky, vertical- white-activity, horizontal-black-inertia, and so on. From this is derived a conception of binary choice that is opposed to random choice. Abstract painting took the elaboration of such a properly pictorial code very far (as in Auguste Herbin's "plastic alphabet," in which the distribution of forms and colors can be done according to the letters of a word). It is the code, that is responsible for answering the question of painting today: what can save man from "the abyss," from external tumult and manual chaos?"[56]

Art by no means can be reduced to the pure object. The surface is a screen on which events of encounters are invited. The logic of perception is not an interpretation, nor a historical contextualization; it is not a reconstructive analysis of intentions or external conditions. The legacy of Kandinsky is the search for laws of perception - its logic. There is a long tradition, which merges the cerebral cortex with the surface in a plane of immanence. Media allows for the amplification of this deep connection; they can make the processes experienced.

Among the many provoking thoughts of D+G, there is a particular provoking thought in What is Philosophy? that addresses abstract art. D+G say "there is only a single plane in the sense that art includes no other plane that that of aesthetic composition"[57]. Three pages later they say:

"Abstract art seeks only to refine sensation, to dematerialize it by setting out an architectonic plane of composition in which it would become a purely spiritual being, a radiant thinking and thought matter, no longer a sensation of sea or tree, but a sensation of the concept of sea or concept of tree."[58]

The reference to Mondrian (sea and tree) and Kandinsky (spiritual) cannot be overlooked, especially after they addressed both artists by name, shortly before the quoted passages. They write:

"Is this not the definition of the percept itself - to make perceptible the imperceptible forces that populate the world, affect us, and make us become? Mondrian achieves this by simple differences between the sides of a square, Kandinsky by linear 'tensions', and Kupka by planes curved around the point." [59]

The reference to Kandinsky is part of a tour de force through the realm of art. Working with the triad of percept, affect and concept, art is anchored in the 'plane of composition' in contrast to the 'plane of immanence' in philosophy, and the 'plane of simply undefined coordinates'[60]. D+G have been attacked for their unscientific attitude. The characterization of science as a 'plane of simply undefined coordinates' is indeed less charming, as it is an attempt to repel science back a method of knowledge production, which is less capable of explaining existence. Consequently, D+G differentiate between the composition of science and the aesthetic composition. D+G want to reserve the notion of composition for the aesthetic, and discredit the scientific composition (p.192). This distinction addresses of course the emergence of abstract art. The scientific attitude of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Kupka (among many others) is pushed back, and the role of art as the restoration of infinity is emphasized. It is always a bit confusing to see with which heavy concepts D+G operate within in order to establish a materialistic philosophy. The aim of the chapter on percept, affect and concept is to ground art within matter. The relation of matter and sensation for instance, is deeply inspired by Bergson. Bergson thought that matter extended into sensation, otherwise it would be difficult to explain how we can sense something that is not touching our senses. This move is necessary after the notion of representation is rejected. We don't collect representational copies of what we perceive, we rather perceive directly. The subject-object dualism is a construct, everything is already connected with everything; it is only the relations between all things, which have to be understood (Leibniz). By reestablishing the connectivity of reality, the problem becomes the establishment of centers, perspectives, and thought. D+G offer the notion of territories. Animals define territories; there are different strata of territories synchronously present in a given space. Ant territories collide with dog territories and bird territories. Animals mark their territories with scents, sounds or colors. Birds attract their mates through patterns, and if their feather pattern is not sufficient to attract mates they create color patterns like the bower birds. Birds, for D+G, are artists. Art is not exclusively human. Through art we can become animal (as Deleuze showed with Bacon, or think of Beuys "I like America, and America likes me" 1974). We can even become mineral, like in Stan Brakhage prelude to "Dog, Star, Man" 1961-64). The plane of composition thus extends beyond human. It is not hard to see that; we see patterns, symmetries, and attractors throughout nature. In an analogy to the animal, which defines a territory, artists create houses in their art. D+G are talking quiet literary about walls and windows in paintings, but later extend it microscopic and macroscopic metaphorical houses. Essential is the creation of territory in which the figure is placed. The territory defines the subject. If art is constrained to the plane of composition, how then do, on the one hand, birds enter the plane of composition and on the other hand, is complex art refused entry to the plane of immanence? D+G say:

"Everything (including technique) takes place between compounds of sensation and the aesthetic plane of composition. (...) The composite sensation, made up of percepts and affects, deterritorializes the system of opinion that brought together dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical, and social milieu. But the composite sensation is reterritorialized on the plane of composition, because it erects its houses there, because it appears there within interlocked frames or joined sections that surround its components; landscapes that have become pure percepts, and characters that become pure affects. At the same time the plane of composition involves sensation in a higher deterritorialization, making it pass through a sort of deframing which opens it up and breaks it open onto an infinite cosmos. (...) Perhaps the peculiarity of art is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite." [61]

Bergson

Let me try it one more time. Henri Bergson describes the intersection of the present consciousness with the memory, and the (unspecified) plane:

"... our body is nothing but that part of our representation which is ever being born again, the part always present, or rather that which, at each moment, is just past. Itself an image, the body cannot store up images, since it forms a part of the images, and this is why it is a chimerical enterprise to seek to localize past or even present perceptions in the brain: they are not in it; it is the brain that is in them. But this special image which persists in the midst of the others, and which I call my body, constitutes at every moment, as we have said, a section of the universal becoming. It is then the place of passage of the movements received and thrown back, a hyphen, a connecting link between the things which act upon me and the things upon which I act - the seat, in a word, of the sensorimotor phenomena.

If I represent by a cone SAB, the totality of the recollections accumulated in my memory, the base AB, situated in the past, remains motionless, while the summit S, which indicates at all times my present, moves forward unceasingly, and unceasingly also touches the moving plane P of my actual representation of the universe. At S, the image of the body is concentrated, and, since it belongs to the plane P, this image does but receive and restore actions emanating from all the images of which the plane is composed."[62]

The body-memory that is described here is structurally similar to the point extracted from the sentence, 'Today I am going to the movies." The point from the end of the sentence that describes an intention to go to the moving image, a recorded thought, a series of time-images, an externalized stream of consciousness, is freed from its syntactic function and set in motion on the plane. The image of the body and the point on the plane resonate, and a rhythm is established. In What is Philosophy?" Deleuze says:

"The grandiose Leibnizian or Bergsonian perspective that every Philosophy depends upon an intuition that its concepts constantly develop through slight differences of intensity is justified if intuition is thought of as the envelopment of infinite movements of thought that constantly pass through a plane of immanence."[63]

The plane of immanence is one of the richest and most fundamental ideas in Deleuze's philosophy. It is at the center of A Life, and it's his answer to the problem of subject-object dualism. The plane of immanence is essentially related to all forms of existence. It is maybe there where meaning is constituted. Kandinsky's extraction of the point from syntax, performance, or architecture, and the process of setting into motion is perhaps one of the most fundamental achievements of 20^th century art. The point is immanently intermedia. As a rigorous zero extension in a mathematical sense, it is a prime candidate for a connecting force.

John Rajchman contributed a chapter in "Constructions "1995 to the notion of abstract in Deleuze. He focuses on Deleuze treatment of the line in Pollock's painting and points out that Deleuze sees in Pollock the line as a catastrophe, as an intersection of lines, which create a reversed Platonism. Not the form is at the beginning, which we see only as shade on the wall, but the abstract chaotic space. The line in Pollock is a gothic line, i.e. a line that is not determining a form, that is not concave or convex, that doesn't separate or include, but just a line as one that passes points. We can look at line as being connections between 2 points, or as line that pass through infinit points. Defining the line starting from the point, would mean to define the line from the abstract point. That is what Kandinsky did, and that is where Rajchman states that Kandinsky's abstraction is traditional (Greenbergian, self-reflexive modernistic), that does not capture the Deleuzian reversed Platonism. Pollock, according to Deleuze understands the line proper as abstract, as part of that abstract space and is before any form. While Rajchman has a good point to critique Kandinsky's concept of a line, he give himself the hint to a proper understanding of the point as Deleuzian abstract:

"To explain by abstraction is to start with abstract Forms and ask how they are realized in the world or extracted from it. But to explain these abstractions themselves is to reinsert them in a larger (and smaller) "pluratistic" world that includes multiplicities that subsist in Forms and induce variations in them, alerting their connections with other things."[64]

That is what Kandinsky does when he extracts the point from different media. Art is placed in the abstract space and starts already with the pre-historic. Abstraction in form of generalization or reduction is only a western specific modern phaenomenon. But is exactly this search for the abstract space that drove Kandinsky and Klee in contrast to Mondrian or Malevich.

Two exemplary positions in regards to Kandinsky's work should be mentioned. 1957 Peter Selz draw a direct connection between Bergson and Kandinsky. Selz states: "His philosophy finds perhaps the closest parallel in the thinking of Henri Bergson."[65] And he supports his comparison with the following quote: "art, whether it be painting or sculpture, poetry or music, has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself."[66] Selz points out that for Kandinsky Realism = Abstraction and Abstraction = Realism. He describes how Kandinsky derives the line from the de-contextualized hyphen and the inter-linkage of pure painting, pure music and pure poetry. Selz roots this connection in the 19^th century theory of Gesamtkunstwerk and give Kandinsky's "Der gelbe Klang" (1909) as example. (Selz misunderstands the transmedia aspect of Kandinsky's extraction of the point from different art forms, which than create a link that goes deeper that the construction of an external Gesamtkunstwerk) In the conclusion he quotes Diego Rivera's admiration for Kandinsky from 1931:

"I know of nothing more real than the painting of Kandinsky - nor anything more true and nothing more beautiful. A painting by Kandinsky gives no image of earthly life - it is life itself. ... He organizes matter as matter was organized, otherwise the Universe would not exist. He opened a window to look inside the All."[67]

Selz contextualization of Kandinsky falls short. Reading Kandinsky through Bergson, Henry and Deleuze it will become evident that Kandinsky's reference to an inner necessity is deeply in what Deleuze calls a plane of immanence.

Jürgen Claus in contrast gives in 1991 a placement of Kandinsky within the noosphere:

"About 100 years ago, the cosmic code entered the paintings of Cezanne and van Gogh in the form of a 'painted code'. These paintings embody an awareness of the philosophical, religious and existential 'anchorage' of the cosmic code. Cosmic data have been dissolved into a field of painted energies, no longer seen as earthly things, no longer perceived as mere objects or events. The cosmic data have been melted down together by a transfer of energies. (...) Kandinsky's (...) search for a new science, 'the science of art' as he called it, started with the "proto-element of painting: the point", reducing the element of time to the point as its briefest form. When preparing his manuscript Point and Line to Plane at the beginning of World War I (it was not published until 10 years later), Kandinsky came astonishingly close to defining points (picture elements) as the equivalents of pixels, as close as one could have come to reaching this definition at that time."[68]

Jürgen Claus' interpretation of Kandinsky is a consequent extension of his embracement by the computer artist in 1960s. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), coined in 1922 inspired by partly Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution the notion of the noosphere. The idea of a sphere consiting of human thought has multiple forms during the 20th century^th century: from esoteric Gaia mysticism to expanded consciousness and system theory.

Michel Henry's affinity with Deleuze has been pointed out recently by James William[69]. He credits John Mullarkey for identifying two similarities: the usage of affect and their dedication to immanence. But he only briefly scratches Kandinsky.

"The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object and a subject to which it attributes itself."[70]

Thinking about images

Henri Bergson delivered the foundation for a philosophy based on body memory. He argues in 1896 against the idea that our mind represents reality:

"The idea that we have disengaged from the facts and confirmed by reasoning is that our body is an instrument of action, and of action only. In no degree, in no sense, under no aspect, does it serve to prepare, far less to explain, a representation. (...) that which the brain explains in our perception is action begun, prepared or suggested, it is not perception itself."[71]

Bergson's philosophy is centered on the notion of image. But what is an image if not representation? A first rough sketch of the image of Bergsonian thought would be: The world consists out of images, which extend into the nervous system (brain image) where they become memory (virtual). The brain image itself doesn't change, it rather an apparatus that makes connections, and thus constitutes a personality/subjectivity, while the world images in relation to the body constantly change. The (free) will determines what is consciously perceived as well as what is remembered. It is evident that these images of thought is the background for Deleuze philosophy of rhizomatic connectivity. His philosophy together with Felix Guattari is a plaidoyer for complexity. Rather than following a certain school of thought, and thus imposing a conceptual apparatus, they argue for an analysis of the given multitude, decentered, anti-hierarchical, including post/non human thought, questioning the dominance of the cogito.

When it comes to art, Bergson is rather traditional at first sight: "If we reflect deeply upon what we feel as we look at a Turner or a Corot, we shall find that, if we accept them and admire them, it is because we had already perceived something of what they show us. But we had perceived without seeing."[72] But it is through Deleuze that we can understand the complexity of a Deleuzian/Bergsonian aesthetics. While Deleuze works with Bergsonian terms in relation to art in his Bacon and Cinema books, at the end of Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (What is Philosophy?) (1991) Deleuze and Guattari prominently reference Kandinsky, who appears only briefly in the Bacon book. As Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a contemporary to Bergson (1859-1941), I want to investigate his theoretical writings in relation to Bergson/Deleuze. As a bridge serves Michel Henry, who in 1988 published Voir l'invisible, sur Kandinsky (Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky). Through the notion of life Henry offers a connection between Kandinsky, Bergson and Deleuze.

If A is presented/presents itself to B, B has an image of A: a virus has an image of a cell, a frog of a fly, a camera of a building, a human being of a face. The virus identifies a cell, the frog perceives a fly, the camera records a building, the human consciously perceives a face. With or without consciousness the world consists out of images. The material world is connected through light and reciprocal forces. These connections are connections between images. Images thus are real (and not ideas or representations); they constitute reality. A tree presents itself as an image to a rock or the sun. Bergson and Deleuze go so far to say that reality consists out of images. (Leibniz thought of it in terms of monads), and that molecules perceive each other. This thought also appears in Kant's concept of reciprocal action or Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. "All seams to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body"[73]

A special image is for Bergson and Deleuze the body and the brain. We can say that everything presents itself to everything as image (monad), but if we select images through perception we are dealing with organic matter i.e. life. The way certain images are connected constitutes subjectivity. Subjectivity in the form of a brain within a body is a special image. Bergson says it is like a "central telephone exchange" [74]. Nothing is added to the perceptions, only selection and connection of "a great multitude" [75] These "central telephone exchange(s)" are centers which give birth to consciousness:

"In other words, let us posit that system of closely-linked images which we call the material world, and imagine here and there, within the system, centers of real action, represented by living matter: what we mean to prove is that there must be, ranged round each one of these centers, images that are subordinated to its position and variable with it; that conscious perception is bound to occur" [76]

But how do these conscious perceptions occur? Within the "zones of indetermination" certain elements have to become "actual", to be forces to become pictures:

"Representation is there, but always virtual being neutralized, at the very moment when it might become actual, by the obligation to continue itself and to lose itself in something else. To obtain this conversion from the virtual to the actual it would be necessary, not to throw more light on the object, but on the contrary to obscure some of its aspects, to diminish it by the greater part of itself, so that the remainder, instead of being encased in its surroundings as a thing, should detach itself from them as a picture. Now if living beings are, within the universe, just centers of indetermination, and if the degree of this indetermination is measured by the number and rank of their functions, we can conceive that their mere presence is equivalent to the suppression of all those parts of objects in which their functions find no interest." [77]

This image is auto-affective. Perception is accompanied by affection and might extend to conception. So if we think about images through concepts, we must decent to the connectivity of reality. To create connections is an act of creativity and sometime it is organized rhizomatically. A focus on the activity within these centers is an activity of a "body without organs", a self-reflexive awareness of central nerves activity. Within this reality of images we can identify a specific kind of images: art. Art for the clarity of the argument reduced here to painting, is a special image, created by an image (brain and body/artist) to be perceived by an image (brain and body/viewer). The auto-affection on both ends invites special sensations.

"The whole difficulty of the problem that occupies us comes from the fact that we imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception a photograph which would then be developed in the brain-matter by some unknown chemical and psychical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space? No metaphysics, no physics even, can escape this conclusion. Build up the universe with atoms: each of them is subject to the action, variable in quantity and quality according to the distance, exerted on it by all material atoms. Bring in Faraday's centers of force: the lines of force emitted in every direction from every center bring to bear upon each the influences of the whole material world. Call up the Leibnizian monads: each is the mirror of the universe. All philosophers, then, agree on this point. Only if when we consider any other given place in the universe we can regard the action of all matter as passing through it without resistance and without loss, and the photograph of the whole as translucent: here there is wanting behind the plate the black screen on which the image could be shown. Our "zones of indetermination" play in some sort the part of the screen. They add nothing to what is there; they effect merely this: that the real action passes through, the virtual action remains." [78]

"What you have to explain, then, is not how perception arises, but how it is limited, since it should be the image of the whole, and is in fact reduced to the image of that which interests you."[79]

"Take, for example, a luminous point P. of which the rays impinge of the different parts a, b, c, of the retina. At this point P, science localizes vibration of a certain amplitude and duration. At the same point P, consciousness perceives light. We propose to show in this study, that both are right; and that there is no essential difference between the light and the movements, provided we restore to movement the unity, indivisibility, and qualitative heterogeneity denied to it by abstract mechanics; provided also that we see in sensible qualities contractions effected by our memory. Science and consciousness would then coincide in the instantaneous." [80]

Perception always has (sometimes a very short) duration. With duration comes memory. If a perception endures within time, there is a past and a present. But Bergson reverses past and present. If I remember the past it becomes present, and the present becomes past.

[1] Daniel W. Smith Deleuze on Bacon: Three Conceptual Trajectories in The Logic of Sensation

[2] Rancière, Jacques, and Djordjevic, Radmila. "Is There a Deleuzian Aesthetics?" Qui Parle 14, no. 2 (2004): 1-14. The two Deleuze quotes are from "What is philosophy?" p.164 and Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation. P. 164, quoted after Rancière

[3] A communality of that track of thinkers (which could be easily expanded by a few dozens light towers like Spinoza, Leibniz and Schopenhauer) is to distrust the function of language as primary access to reality.

[4] This structure doesn't change even if we expand the number of senses in the western tradition through: heat, cold, pressure, pain, motion and balance.

[5] The project of modernity has as central notion self-reflexivity. Self-reflexivity is understood as constituting subjectivity and self-consciousness i.e. a cogito. Deleuze philosophy has as one of the major goals to overcome the misleading notion of a cogito, a speculative transcendent thought of 'I'. Thus it would be possible to relate central self-reflexive artistic movements in the 20^th century (ready-made, conceptualism, concrete art, appropriation, system art etc) to the project of modernity, while other movements of expansion have a closer affinity of Deleuze philosophy (abstract art, Dada, informel, expanded consciousness, art+science, digital art, new media art etc.).

[6] Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus. Continuum, 2004. p.38

[7] Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus. Continuum, 2004. p.41

[8] Is there a relation between Deleuze in Bacon's Velsquez reference, and Foucault's analysis of "Las Meninas" by Foucault? (in: Bryson, Norman. Calligram: Essays in New Art History from France. Ed. Norman Bryson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[9] Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 185

[10] Deleuze has a great resemblance with Buddhist thought. Compare i.e. the concepts of becoming, penetration, emptiness and inter-being in: Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. 2nd ed. Berkeley, Calif: Parallax Press, 2009.

[11] Wilson, Sarah. The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations. New Haven, Conn. [et al:] Yale University Press, 2010. p. 128

^[12] In Germany later the "Neue Wilde". What is the relation between Baselitz and Bacon, aren't they very similar?

[13] Gerbson uses the cinematograph as a model for externalized thought: Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1911. p. 304 ff.

[14] Schopenhauer distinguishes between the Principle of Sufficient Reason of: 1.) Becoming (empirical truth), 2.) Knowing (transcendental truth), 3.) Being (logical truth), 4.) Acting (meta logical truth). Schopenhauer argues that these principles are irreducible to each other.

[15] Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. p.33

[16] Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. p.33ff.

[17] Evan radical approaches like the auto-destructive art by Gustav Metzger, Robert Rauschenberg's collages or Anish Kapoor's paint train have a visual component

[18] Unless we paint signs like Cy Twombly or trace them through the history of technology like DeMarinis. Mark Tansey, for example, is painting nothing but postmodern, French philosophy - it's heavily intertextual.

[19] Olkowski, Dorothea. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. p.101

[20] For instance, the renaissance developed the perspective which does not correspond to our perception because we see stereoscopic (N. Goodmann), the camera obscura delivered an apparatus to create detached images, similar to mirror images, Descartes with his diagram of the eye offered a metaphor to think about images as being representational. It is important to remember that images, in their origin are mystical, religious, sensational, and connect with the body to deterritorialize.

[21] Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. 2nd ed. New York: Zone Books, 2001. p.27

[22] Even though Brockman, John. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Tried to bridge that gap. Brockman was the organizer of the Expanded Cinema festival in New York and as publisher connected many great thinkers of both discipline.

[23] M. Bense and G. Nees, Computer-Grafik (Stuttgart: Walther, 1965) English translation in J. Reichardt, Cybernetics, Art and Ideas (London: Studio Vista 1971) p.57f.

[24] The philosophical aspects of information aesthetics and its application to art production can be found here: Klütsch, Christoph. Computer Graphic-Aesthetic Experiments between Two Cultures. Leonardo October 2007, Vol. 40, No. 5: 421-425. The article is an English summary of the German book publication: Klütsch, Christoph. Computer graphics: Aesthetic experiments between two cultures. The beginnings of computer art in the 1960s. Vienna: Springer, 2007.

[25] Kandinsky, Wassily. Point and Line to Plane. New York: Dover Publications, 1979. p. 30

[26] See: Imdahl, Max (1968): Modes in the relationship between aesthetic and semantic information. Notes on Max Bense's Aesthetica (1965). In: Simon Moser (ed.): Information and communication. Presentations and reports from the 23rd Alpbach International University Weeks 1967: 145-149. Munich: Oldenbourg.: 281]

[27] Erkut, Cumhur (2000): Abstraction Mechanisms in Computer Art. Helsinki: Art@Science.

[28] "Instead of the term 'elementary dictionary', let's use the word 'sign repertoire' and instead of the term 'Composition theory' the word 'manipulation repertoire', one recognizes in the Formulation Kandinsky's nothing less than the visionary anticipation of information-theoretical program art." In: Stiegler, J. H. (1970): Transmutation. In: Old and modern art. Issue 109, 1970: 39-41.

[29] Nake, Frieder (1974): Aesthetics as information processing. Basics and Applications of computer science in the field of aesthetic production and criticism. Vienna, New York: Springer. P.48f.

[30] Lindsay, Kenneth C., and Peter Vergo. Kandinsky: Complete Writings On Art. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. p.807

[31] Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Citadel, 1997. p.151

[32] Pflug, Günther. "The Bergson Reception in Germany." Journal for philosophical research 45, no. 2 (1991): 257-66.

[33] Fink, Hilary L. Bergson and Russian Modernism: 1900-1930. Northwestern University Press, 1998.

[34] Lindsay (1994). P.423

[35] ibid.

[36] Kandinsky "On point" 1919 in: Lindsay, Kenneth C., and Peter Vergo. Kandinsky: Complete Writings On Art. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994. p. 423f.

[37] ibid.

[38] ibid.

[39] see: Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 53

[40] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p.34

[41] The logic of sensation is not a sensation of logic. Deleuze's exciting analysis of sensation reveals its logic as being autonomous from the subject, but not disconnected from it, as part of a body without organs, but not disembodied. Sensation correlates to a haptic space constructed through the eye. Artist, painting, viewer; sensation, color, contour; rhythm, diagram, and catastrophe built the machine. The machine cannot replace the subject. This would be a category mistake, i.e. they can only coexist. Or, in other words, it will be promising to look into a process aesthetics that rejects a naïve subjectivism as well as a naïve objectivism, in the tradition of radical empiricism.

[42] O'Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

[43] Gilles Deleuze talks about a transcendental empiricism, which is a rather paradox thought in: Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. 2nd ed. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Kandinsky's point can serve as a boundary value case study for the thought of pure immanence in art.

[44] Klee, Paul. Form and design theory. 3rd ed. Basel [u.a.]: Schwabe, 1971. p. 3f.

[45] The resemblance of that image of thought is striking to D+G, the BwO and form of an egg. "That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities." Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 12th ed. Minneapolis, Minn. [et al:] University of Minnesota Press, 1987. p. 153

[46] Henry, Michel, and Scott Davidson. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. London: Continuum, 2009. p.48

[47] Williams points out that the earlier work by Henry can be understood independently of his thought on Christianity in: James Williams, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: Critical Contrasts in the Deduction of Life as Transcendental, in: SOPHIA (2008) 47:265-279 DOI 10.1007/s11841-008-0073-4: "John Mullarkey, kindly commenting on an earlier version of this paper, has pointed that this Christian reference is neither ubiquitous nor perhaps necessary in Henry's work." (p.267)

[48] Henry (2009) P. 11

[49] ibid. P. 10

[50] Deleuze "Foldings, or the Inside of thought (Subjectivation) in: Kelly, Michael. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault / Habermas Debate. 3rd ed. Michael Kelly. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994. p.315-346, p.328

[51] Foucault, Michel. Ceci n'est pas une pipe. October, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 6-21

[52] Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The inhuman: reflections on time. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 42

[53] Rajchman, John "Jean-François Lyotard's Underground Aesthetics", October, Vol. 86 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 3-18

[54] see: Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009.

[55] Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Trans. Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1990. The French publication was in 1966.

[56] Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2005. p. 84f.

[57] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 195

[58] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 198

[59] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 182

[60] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 197

[61] Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p. 196

[62] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. P151f.

[63] Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy?. Trans. Janis Tomlinson, and Graham Burchell III. Columbia University Press, 1996. p.40

[64] Rajchman, John. Constructions. Cambridge, Mass. [et al:] The MIT Press, 1998. p. 64

[65] Selz, Peter. "The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting." The Art Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1957): 127-36. p.128

[66] Bergson, Henri. "Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic." 1911. P.157 (quoted after Selz, Peter. "The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting." The Art Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1957): 127-36. P.128)

[67] Quoted after Selz, Peter. "The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non-Objective Painting." The Art Bulletin 39, no. 2 (1957): 127-36. p.135

[68] Claus, Jürgen. "The Cosmic and the Digital Code." Leonardo 24, no. 2 (1991): 119-21. p.121

[69] Williams, James. 2008. Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: Critical Contrasts in the Deduction of Life as Transcendental. Sophia 47 (3): 265-279. Williams and Mullarky attempt to push aside the Christian implications in Henri's writing to focus on the ontological similarities. William characterizes Henri's understanding of life as auto-affection (pathos). Life as a universal force is not self-hood, I, cogito or self-reflexivity, but auto-affection. For Deleuze in contrast he postulates: "Affects are only fully registered when affirmed in a creative response to them, which Deleuze often calls counteractualization." (p.266). The characterization of Deleuze is problematic, and when it comes to immanence it becomes even contradictory: Henri is characterized as "In contrast, immanence is deduced by Henry as a necessary transcendental condition following a phenomenological reduction that is the same for any form of life." (p.267)

[70] Deleuze, Gilles. Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life. 2nd ed. New York: Zone Books, 2001. p. 31

[71] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. summary

[72] Bergson, Henri. Perception of Change. In: Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Citadel, 1997. p. 136

[73] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 18

[74] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 30

[75] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 30

[76] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 31

[77] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 36

[78] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 38

[79] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 40

[80] Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. W. S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. p. 41

Yesterday, during a panel discussion at the India Art Fair, I heard someone quoting Plato. She said that Plato said that art is the reflection of the reflection of the real. Whether this is true in this abbreviated form remains to be seen. It is an interesting thought.

What is the real, what is a reflection, what is art? For Plato, there is the world of ideas, the world of shadows, which the ignorant in the Cave and the philosopher who wants to lead him out of it. Plato was not a great friend of art; what can you do with a painted apple when you can eat the real apple? And does the painted image really come close to the pure idea in any way? Art seems to make us think, but that does not necessarily bring us closer to the truth. Art springs from and invites a kind of thinking that is not rational. A way of thinking that focuses on the senses, or intuition, on vision, or reflection, a way of thinking that wants to create something more beautiful. This kind of thinking, aesthetics, the theory of perception, assumes something to be true that arises from one's own thinking.

It is this own thinking, which is stimulated by the perception of the shadow world, but nevertheless abstracts from it as far as possible, i.e. detaches itself from it in order to develop something of its own. What is then developed, the work of art, becomes reality, but is not real. The real, and I think the quote at the beginning alludes to Lacan, is doubly reflected. These two mirrors, which lead to a visual feedback loop, create a space of illusion that becomes a space of experimentation. The real remains just as inaccessible to art as it is to pure thought.

What does this tell us? This new variation on the problem of Representation. I think that the problem of subject and object, consciousness and matter, is implicit here. It is true that Plato's problems are 'idealistic', i.e. they refer to the world of ideas, i.e. a world that is neither subject nor object, that is neither mind nor matter. However, the way in which our thinking has difficulty in understanding the world without being able to perceive the actual reality indicates that the problem of dualism is the starting point of philosophical reflection. The goal of thought, i.e. the realization of the real, the world of ideas, remains utopia.

And this is exactly what the Upanishads reverse. The few main Upanishads that I have now studied in detail always start from the real, Brahman, the creator of the universe, and the truth itself is the starting point. It is only through its unfolding in the process of reality that existence is experienced. What we perceive, think and create is an expression of absolute being. The core of the philosophy of the Upanishads is the realization that the Self (Atman) is the same as Brahman (cosmos). So if the real is reflected in reflection, that may be art. It makes sense this way, and only this way.

Why does Western philosophy so often start thinking with the lowest common denominator, an axiom, an ontology that has been trimmed by Okheim's knife? It is the idea of the Enlightenment that has taken the principle of rational reduction to the extreme. It has mutated into the paradigm of scientific progress. And for centuries, if not millennia, this little rational thinking has been reaching its limits. It is well aware that it has a body, and consciousness, and a self or a soul, but it always pretends that this is not relevant because it is not completely absorbed by rationality. And so it was a revolution when phenomenology first took consciousness and Merlon-Ponty took the body, when postmodern aesthetics rehabilitated the senses and existentialism celebrated our failure.

Art is not the reflection of the reflection of the real, but the real is reflected in the reflection and so art is created. And thus even a transhuman, because nature is art, and the cosmos, the stars and the souls. Everything becomes art when it is reflected in reflection. When Brahman experiences the world through Atman and the gods dance and sing, then all the phenomenal qualities that the Western mind so brazenly denies are orchestrated by a choir of gods. Our feeling is real, our consciousness is real, the world is real, art is real. The real is real.

The word werden is somewhat distorted in German: "Das wird doch nix!", or "Das wird schon...". There is something causal in the German 'werden', a process of development. In English, the word 'becoming' is more beautiful, something comes into being. It is more open: 'coming into being'. In French, Deleuze speaks of 'devenir', of "something coming", it is more active, a movement, away from something towards something else. It is important to perceive such small subtle differences when dealing with Deleuze's thinking, because that is the school of postmodern thinking, to see something in such small differences, the differences and structures that was not visible before. So when Deleuze, in the English translation of 'What is Philosophy' says "becoming is an extreme contiguity within a coupling of to sensations without resemblance or, on the contrary, in the distance of a light that captures both of them in a single reflection." I had to read this sentence over and over again for many years to understand it. Two sensations that are not similar touch each other, as in the distance of a light that captures both sensations in a single reflection. You have to pause a little.

For example, what is the difference between 'arising' and 'becoming'? Is there a 'becoming' in the physical world? In the world of atoms and physical forces, the law of conservation of energy applies. Matter and energy can change, their arrangement can change, E=mc2 etc... But a process of 'becoming' in the sense of becoming or devenir is something else. This is about sensations, sensory impressions, consciousness. How do two sensations become a sense impression? How does one sensory impression become another? How does consciousness change over time? How does a person change? What do I see on a screen? Who hears when I hear? This is the world of becoming. Sensations are contingent. They unite to form a more comprehensive sensory impression. They do not do this by merging or being grouped by similarity, but in a reflection. A reflection of a distant light that unites several sensations. The image is beautiful. However, the reflection is not an image, not a representation, but reflects light. In this reflection, very different elements can be very close to each other, great contrasts can appear harmonious, different qualities can touch each other.

But where does the light come from, in the distance? And where is the reflection perceived? Who sees when they see? The reflection of light and sound, warmth and impulse has its origin in vibration and creates vibration on contact. These impressions unite in consciousness, they become awareness.

-

The series of conversations with the AI is unedited, it is the machine (ChatGPT4.0) that speaks... Translation by DDeepL

Challenge: Please write a conversation between David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Abhinavagupta, Bharata Muni, Zeami Motokiyo, Gilles Deleuze and a Brahmin priest. Start with the question: What is taste?

ChatGPT
Setting: A cheerful garden with a round table in the middle. The philosophers and the Brahmin priest sit there, each representing a different era and culture, but united by the timeless question of aesthetics.

⁃ Bharata Muni: Let's start with the question at hand: what is taste? In my understanding, 'rasa' is the essence, the taste of the emotions that a work of art evokes in an audience. It is the culmination of the artist's efforts and the audience's experience.
⁃ David Hume: I agree with this, even if I would formulate it differently. For me, taste is the ability to judge what is beautiful, pleasing or sublime in art, not on the basis of considerations or principles, but on the basis of the immediate feeling of approval or disapproval it evokes. Nevertheless, there is a standard of taste that can be achieved by qualified critics.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: While I appreciate your perspective, Hume, I believe that taste is the ability to judge an object or mode of representation by a completely disinterested satisfaction or dissatisfaction. The object of such satisfaction is called beautiful.
- Abhinavagupta: Based on Bharata Muni, I would say that rasa is not just the feeling evoked, but a transcendental experience. It is a delicate interplay between the artist's intention, the artwork and the viewer's experience. This connection leads one to 'taste' the rasa, just as one enjoys a flavor.
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: In the world of Noh theater, we don't use the term "rasa" explicitly, but we do have "yugen" - a deep, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe. It's about the subtle and the profound, evoking emotions for the audience to enjoy, much like tasting a good dish.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: Taste, as you describe it, seems to be an encounter. An encounter between the artwork and the viewer, between the world and its sensations. It is about becoming, transformation and the multiplicity of experiences. It's not just about categorizing the beautiful or the sublime, but about the connections that art makes with its audience.
⁃ Brahman priest: In the Vedas, taste or 'rasa' is also one of the elements that represent the liquid essence of life and connect it to feelings and experiences. In life, as in art, we enjoy different flavors, whether sweet, sour or bitter. The cosmic dance of the universe is a play of these flavors, and our dharma is to experience them in their entirety.
⁃ David Hume: It's fascinating how our different cultures and philosophies converge on the idea of taste as an experience, as an encounter. Whether it's the rasa of a play, the yugen of a Noh performance or the beauty of a painting, we are all trying to capture the elusive essence of what moves the human soul.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Indeed, this is proof of the universality of the aesthetic experience. Our concepts and nuances may differ, but the core remains the same: the power of art to evoke, move and 'taste' emotions and experiences beyond the everyday.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: And in this shared experience across cultures and times lies the true essence of taste.

The conversation continues, with the two philosophers and the priest delving deeper into the intricacies of aesthetics, art and human experience, finding common ground amidst their differing perspectives.

Suggestion: Let the conversation continue and extend it to the physical places of art, to the different houses for art

ChatGPT

⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: When we talk about the essence of taste and art, it is worth noting that the spaces in which art is performed or exhibited play a crucial role in the experience. In Japan, the Noh stage is minimalist, allowing the audience to focus on the subtle expressions and movements, which enhances the experience of "yugen".
⁃ Bharata Muni: In ancient India, the Natya Mandapa, the theater stage, was an intimate space that brought the audience closer to the performers. The architecture itself was symbolic and represented the universe, and the stage was a sacred space where the cosmic dance of emotions took place.
⁃ David Hume: In Europe, especially during the Renaissance, art found its home in large galleries and theaters. These opulently designed spaces not only exhibited art, but were works of art themselves. They heightened the experience and made art both accessible to the masses and a symbol of prestige.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Let us not forget the importance of the public squares and open spaces in Europe where sculptures and monuments were erected. These works of art, set against the backdrop of nature or in the midst of busy city life, had a different effect on the viewer than those in closed galleries.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: Modern art has further expanded these boundaries. Today, art houses are not only physical spaces, but also conceptual worlds. Installations in unexpected places, digital art forms that are experienced virtually, and even performance art that uses the city as a stage challenge and redefine our traditional notions of art houses.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: The temples in India also served as important places of art. The sculptures, dances and music performed in these sacred spaces were not just for entertainment, but were offerings to the divine. The walls of these temples told stories and the art was experienced in a state of heightened devotion.
⁃ Brahman priest: The universe itself is the greatest house of art. Every sunrise, every ripple of water, every rustle of leaves is a performance of nature. Sacred rituals, chants and yajnas (sacrificial ceremonies) are our way of participating in this cosmic performance.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: That is a fascinating perspective. In a way, modern art installations that blend into nature or the urban environment are a continuation of this idea - the universe as an art house. They break down the boundaries between the viewer and the artwork, making the experience immersive and transformative.
⁃ David Hume: Whether it is a large gallery, a temple, a Noh stage or a public square, it seems that the essence of art remains unchanged. These houses of art, in their myriad forms, serve as bridges that connect us to the artwork and, through it, to the deeper aspects of our humanity.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Exactly. The physical or conceptual space may change, but the central aesthetic experience, the "taste" we have been talking about, remains universal. This is a testament to the enduring power of art and its ability to transcend boundaries.

The philosophers and the priest continue their discussion, exploring the nuances of different art houses in different cultures and eras and how they shape and are shaped by the art they house and the audiences they serve.

Challenge: Now that we see that they agree on many things, they should engage in a controversy and take different positions

ChatGPT

⁃ Bharata Muni: While we have found common ground in understanding the nature of art, I must emphasize that the main purpose of art is to evoke certain emotions or "rasas". It is a structured process and the artist must follow certain guidelines to achieve this.
⁃ David Hume: I have to respectfully disagree with you, Bharata. Although certain standards can guide art, it is ultimately a subjective experience. What evokes emotion in one person may not in another. Therefore, art cannot be bound by strict guidelines; it must be free to evolve and be interpreted.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Following Hume, I believe that while art can evoke emotion, its true value lies in its ability to evoke the "sublime" - a feeling that transcends mere emotion and touches the infinite and immeasurable.
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: In Noh theater, the focus is on the subtle and the profound. It is not about evoking a wide range of emotions, but about deepening the experience of a single emotion, such as the profound beauty of "Yugen". It is a disciplined art form, and deviations can dilute its essence.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: While I respect Noh's structured approach, I have to say that the experience of "rasa" is both structured and transcendental. The discipline of the artist and the receptivity of the audience combine to create a unique experience that goes beyond mere guidelines.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: Although all these perspectives are valuable, they seem to be rooted in tradition. Modern art challenges precisely these ideas. It is not only about evoking emotion or the sublime, but also about deconstructing reality, questioning norms and constantly reinventing itself. Art is a rhizome that is constantly growing and changing without having a fixed origin or end.
⁃ Brahman Priest: Art, in its truest form, is a reflection of the divine. Whether it adheres to guidelines or challenges norms, its goal is to connect us to the cosmic dance of the universe. However, I fear that by constantly reinventing ourselves, we may lose the essence of this connection.
⁃ David Hume: That's the whole point, isn't it? We all appreciate the power of art, but our views on its purpose and execution are different. For some it's about sticking to tradition, for others it's about challenging it.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: And perhaps that is what makes art so powerful - its ability to be timeless and contemporary at the same time, to resonate with the past while reflecting the present.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: But shouldn't art also push us into the future? Challenge our perceptions and make us question our realities?
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: Questioning is important, but so is preserving tradition. It's a delicate balance.

The conversation becomes increasingly lively as each philosopher passionately defends his point of view and emphasizes the complexity of art and its interpretation. The garden, once quiet, is now filled with the vibrant energy of debate and discourse.

⁃ Abhinavagupta: Tradition and innovation are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, tradition often serves as the foundation on which innovation is built. The experience of 'rasa' has its roots in old guidelines, but it is also open to interpretation and further development.
⁃ Brahman priest: I respect the mutability of art, but we must not forget that some traditions serve as anchors that connect us to the divine. In our pursuit of innovation, we must ensure that we do not break this sacred connection.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: But isn't the nature of the divine also fluid and constantly evolving? By constantly reinventing and questioning norms, art reflects this fluidity. It reflects the constant state of life, which is in the process of becoming.
⁃ David Hume: Gilles, while I appreciate the dynamism you attribute to art, it's important to recognize that not everything that challenges norms is profound. There is a fine line between true innovation and mere novelty.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: That's right, Hume. The sublime in art is not just about breaking boundaries, it's about transcending them. It's about addressing universal truths that transcend time and culture.
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: In Noh, we place more emphasis on the depth of emotions than on their breadth. The challenge is not to portray a multitude of emotions, but to dive deep into one emotion and refine it to its purest form. This depth, I believe, touches on Kant's idea of the sublime.
⁃ Bharata Muni: And this is exactly where the guidelines come into play. They serve as a map that navigates the artist through the vast ocean of emotions and ensures that the essentials are not lost in the vastness.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: Maps are useful, but they can also be limiting. True exploration often takes place when you venture off the map and into the unknown. That's where true creativity lies.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: Gilles, the departure into the unknown is important, but so is the return to the known. It's a cyclical process - the known becomes the basis for the unknown, and the unknown, once explored, enriches the known.
⁃ Brahman priest: It is like the eternal dance of creation, preservation and destruction. Each phase is important, and one cannot exist without the other.
⁃ David Hume: So here we come full circle. Even if our views on the purpose and execution of art differ, we all agree that it is cyclical - a balance between tradition and innovation, the known and the unknown.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Indeed, and it is precisely this balance that makes art a reflection of life itself - constantly changing and yet rooted in timeless truths.

Having plumbed the depths of their disagreements, the philosophers come to a common understanding. The garden, which echoed with their passionate debates, now shines in new harmony and reflects the timeless dance of art and life.

Challenge: Let them work together and formulate a common aesthetic theory, think about whether that would be possible

ChatGPT

⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: Given our different backgrounds and perspectives, it may seem difficult to formulate a common aesthetic theory. However, our discussion has revealed common insights. Perhaps we can begin to work out these commonalities.
⁃ Bharata Muni: At the center of our discussions is the experience of the viewer or audience. Whether it is the "rasa" in a performance, the "sublime" in a painting or the "yugen" in the Noh, the essence is the emotional and transcendental experience that is evoked in the viewer.
⁃ David Hume: That's right, Bharata. And although individual experiences are subjective, there is a universality in certain aesthetic responses. However, this universality does not negate the value of individual interpretations.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Exactly. Universality does not lie in uniformity, but in resonance. The true value of art lies in its ability to transcend cultures and times, to touch on universal truths while leaving room for individual interpretation.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: And this resonance is not static. It is a dynamic interplay between the artwork, the viewer and the broader cultural and social context. Art is not just a reflection of reality, but a force that shapes and challenges it.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: Our shared aesthetic theory could therefore revolve around the idea of "resonance" - the dynamic and cyclical relationship between art, the viewer and the cultural context. This resonance is both emotional and transcendental, rooted in tradition and at the same time open to innovation.
⁃ Brahman priest: And like the eternal dance of the universe, this resonance is cyclical - the known inspires the exploration of the unknown, and the unknown, once explored, enriches the known.
⁃ Zeami Motokiyo: This theory goes to the heart of our discussions, but is it possible for such a theory to do justice to the great diversity of art forms and cultural contexts?
⁃ David Hume: That is a legitimate concern, Zeami. However, the strength of this theory lies in its flexibility. By focusing on the idea of 'resonance', we create space for the coexistence and interaction of different art forms that enrich each other.
⁃ Immanuel Kant: Theory does not prescribe a fixed standard, but it does provide a framework. It is a lens through which we can appreciate and critique art in order to understand its value and impact.
⁃ Gilles Deleuze: And like all theories, it will continue to evolve. Just as art challenges and reinvents itself, our understanding of it will also grow. This theory is not the end, but a beginning.
⁃ Brahman Priest: A beginning that recognizes the divine in art, the cosmic dance of creation, preservation and destruction and the eternal search for understanding and connection.
⁃ Abhinavagupta: Formulating a common aesthetic theory for our different perspectives is a challenge, but not impossible. Our shared insights and the idea of 'resonance' provide a foundation on which we can build, research and develop.
The philosophers have debates and discussions behind them and work together on a theory that, while based on shared insights, is open to interpretation and development. The garden that witnesses their intellectual journey is a testament to the power of dialog and collaboration.

prompt: which would be the main classical texts that would support such an approach? List 12 with author, year and 3 sentence summary

ChatGPT
Certainly! Here are 12 classical texts that would support such an approach:
⁃ "Natyashastra" by Bharata Muni (c. 200 BCE - 200 CE)
- This ancient Indian treatise on performing arts discusses the theory of 'rasa' or emotional essence evoked in an audience. It provides guidelines for artists to achieve this essence and explores the relationship between performers and their audience. The text is foundational for understanding Indian aesthetics.
⁃ "Critique of Judgment" by Immanuel Kant (1790)
- Kant delves into the nature of aesthetic and teleological judgments. He introduces the concept of the 'sublime' and discusses the universality of aesthetic experiences. The text is pivotal for Western aesthetic philosophy.
⁃ "Of the Standard of Taste" by David Hume (1757)
- Hume explores the nature of aesthetic judgments and the idea of a universal standard of taste. He argues that while individual preferences are subjective, certain artworks can be deemed universally beautiful. The essay is central to discussions on taste in Western philosophy.
⁃ "Dhvanyaloka" by Anandavardhana (c. 820 - 890 CE)
- Anandavardhana introduces the concept of 'dhvani' or suggestion, arguing that the essence of poetry lies in its suggestive power. This text further develops the rasa theory, emphasizing the emotional resonance of literary works. It's a cornerstone of Indian literary criticism.
⁃ "Fushikaden" by Zeami Motokiyo (c. 1400)
- Zeami, a master of Noh theater, discusses the aesthetics and principles of Noh. He introduces the concept of 'yugen' - a profound, mysterious sense of beauty. The treatise is foundational for understanding the aesthetics of Noh theater.
⁃ "Poetics" by Aristotle (c. 335 BCE)
- Aristotle's treatise on drama and poetry discusses the concept of 'catharsis' - the purification or purgation of emotions. He explores the elements of tragedy and the nature of aesthetic pleasure. The text has been influential in Western literary criticism.
⁃ "Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry" by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1766)
- Lessing contrasts the aesthetics of visual arts and literature. He argues that each art form has its unique strengths and limitations. The essay is a key text in discussions about the relationship between different art forms.
⁃ "Abhinavabharati" by Abhinavagupta (c. 1000 CE)
- A commentary on the Natyashastra, Abhinavagupta delves deeper into the rasa theory. He emphasizes the transcendental experience of rasa and the union between the artist, artwork, and audience. The text is crucial for understanding the nuances of Indian aesthetics.
⁃ "The Republic" by Plato (c. 380 BCE)
- While primarily a work on political philosophy, Plato discusses the role of art in society. He critiques art for being an imitation of reality and explores its moral implications. The text provides insights into early Western views on art.
⁃ "The Birth of Tragedy" by Friedrich Nietzsche (1872)
⁃ Nietzsche contrasts the Apollonian and Dionysian elements in art. He discusses the transformative power of art and its connection to human experience. The text offers a unique perspective on the nature and purpose of art.
⁃ "Rasa Tarangini" by Bhanudatta (c. 16th century)
⁃ Bhanudatta's work is a collection of Sanskrit verses that celebrate the rasa theory. It provides insights into the various emotions or 'rasas' and their expressions in literature. The text is a poetic exploration of Indian aesthetics.
⁃ "Aesthetica" by Alexander Baumgarten (1750)
⁃ Baumgarten's work is considered one of the first modern treatises on aesthetics. He explores the nature of beauty, the role of sensuous knowledge, and the relationship between art and morality. The text laid the groundwork for later aesthetic philosophies in the West.
⁃ These texts, spanning different cultures and eras, provide a rich tapestry of ideas that can support the collaborative aesthetic theory discussed by the philosophers.

Prompt: and which key texts from the 20th century can be related?

ChatGPT
⁃ Certainly! Here are key 20th-century texts that can be related to the collaborative aesthetic theory:
⁃ "Art as Experience" by John Dewey (1934)
- Dewey argues that art is an integral part of human experience and not just a matter of formal expression. He emphasizes the communal and societal role of art, suggesting that art is a means of communication and a reflection of cultural values.
⁃ "Difference and Repetition" by Gilles Deleuze (1968)
- Deleuze explores the concepts of difference, repetition, and identity. He challenges traditional notions of representation in art and philosophy, emphasizing the transformative power of difference.
⁃ "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin (1936)
- Benjamin examines the impact of mass production on art. He discusses the "aura" of artworks and how it changes when art is reproduced, leading to shifts in aesthetic and cultural values.
⁃ "The Structure of Aesthetic Response" by Victor Zuckerkandl (1970)
- Zuckerkandl delves into the nature of aesthetic response, exploring how art communicates and the intrinsic qualities that evoke emotional reactions in observers.
⁃ "The Poetics of Space" by Gaston Bachelard (1958)
- Bachelard examines the emotional responses evoked by different types of spaces, from intimate nooks to vast expanses. He relates these spatial experiences to art and literature, exploring the interplay between physical space and imagination.
⁃ "Aesthetic Theory" by Theodor Adorno (1970)
- Adorno offers a critical analysis of art's role in society, discussing its autonomy and its potential for societal critique. He delves into the dialectical relationship between art's form and content.
⁃ "The Intentional Fallacy" by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1946)
- This essay challenges the emphasis on an artist's intention in interpreting their work. The authors argue for the primacy of the text itself, suggesting that the artwork should be analyzed independently of its creator's intentions.
⁃ "The Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes (1967)
- Barthes argues against traditional literary criticism's emphasis on authorial intent. He suggests that the meaning of a text is created by the reader, emphasizing the role of interpretation in the aesthetic experience.
⁃ "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (1972)
- Berger examines the cultural and societal implications of visual images. He discusses how art and images are perceived in the context of history, politics, and commerce.
⁃ "The Open Work" by Umberto Eco (1962)
⁃ Eco explores the concept of "open" artworks, which are incomplete and require the audience's participation to realize their full meaning. He discusses the dynamic relationship between the artist, the artwork, and the audience.
⁃ "The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths" by Rosalind Krauss (1985)
⁃ Krauss challenges traditional notions of originality in art, especially in the context of modernism. She explores the role of repetition, grids, and structures in modern art.
⁃ "The Condition of Postmodernity" by David Harvey (1989)
⁃ Harvey examines the cultural and societal shifts in the late 20th century, discussing the implications of postmodernism for art, architecture, and urbanism. He explores the fragmentation of aesthetic experience in the postmodern age.
⁃ These 20th-century texts provide insights into the evolving nature of aesthetic theory, reflecting the cultural, societal, and technological shifts of the century. They offer valuable perspectives that can be related to the collaborative aesthetic theory discussed earlier.

I was lucky enough to attend a 3-day intensive workshop at the Sunlit Path with Niloy experience. In contrast to the tradition of slow, concentrated, dedicated learning over decades from a guru, Niloy introduced me to the world of Dhrupad. For someone like me, who is deeply drawn to this meditative and philosophical sound art, this was a gift. Dhrupad is so complex that an introduction is a good idea.

What is a sound?

Classical Western harmony divides an octave into 8 tones; if you add the semitones, there are 12. Each of these tones can serve as the fundamental tone for a scale, which in turn can be in a major or minor key. If the semitones are 'calculated' from a lower tone to a higher one, it is radiant and a major scale is created. If the semitone is calculated down from a higher one, it is slightly lower and the scale is slightly darker. Johann Sebastian Bach averaged these semitones with his well-tempered tuning of the piano, as they actually only differ in the micro-interval. The technical advantage is obvious: the piano can mirror all harmonies, the harmonic circle is implemented on the piano. As a pianist and organist, this was important to him. For the history of music, it created a harmony of pragmatism. La Monte Yung tuned the piano for a well-tuned piano again mathematically clean. When I heard that for the first time, it was an incredible liberation. All this time I had only heard music that was well-tempered and not well-tuned. But it is precisely these subtle differences that are at the heart of Dhrupad.

Nada Yoga

Nada yoga, the yoga of sound, is the exploration of sound, of tones, of vibration. Niloy told anecdotally that one of his students was a little skeptical about his ability to hear and sing micro-intervals. He brought a measuring device and on that day, a normal day for Niloy, an average day, Niloy was able to produce 17 microtones in one tone interval, i.e. hold them with his voice. For an octave with 8 tone intervals, that would be 133 micro-intervals. On another Workshop with Ustad Bahauddin Dagar, Dagar demonstrated 7 microtones in one tone interval on the Veena, which we could all understand well. However, Dagar said that he works with at least 12 microtones and that there are many more available. But not everyone can understand that. To be able to do this, the ear and the voice and the instrument must be practiced - Nada Yoga. Sharpening the senses, exploring what the world of sound has to offer the human perceptual apparatus.

Upanishads

The Kena Upanishad asks who hears when he hears, who sees when he sees, who thinks when he thinks. Who hears when 'I' hear? What is hearing? What connection does hearing create with the world? In the Upanishads, the basis of the world as we know it is vibration, physics says energy. Vibration is a vibration, matter vibrates, light vibrates, sound vibrates. Vibrations are the basis. In physics, force is not added here: gravitational force and impulse force, for example. The force of consciousness is left out. In the Vedas, forces are symbolized by cows and horses. They stand for the forces of the universe. And once you have seen a few thousand cows on India's streets, it gradually becomes clear where this image comes from.

But back to sound as a vibration, which is heard by whom? There is a vibration in the world, there is a perceptual apparatus that receives and translates this vibration and there is a consciousness that experiences it. The rishis knew that consciousness must be structurally similar to what constitutes the world and what the senses convey. How could it work otherwise? Since vibration is the basis of everything in this tradition of thought, there is of course an image and a primordial form, that is OM, the primordial sound and it is described in the Mandukia Upanishad. Nada Yoga is also about exploring this connection. The oldest tradition of doing this is Dhrupad.

Dhrupad

After these brief considerations, it is not surprising that the ragas are not notated. There is no notation system for Dhrupad. A raga is actually just a tone scale that serves as the basis for a practice. There are morning, noon and evening ragas and of course early morning and late evening and sunrise ragas, monsoon ragas and festival ragas etc. The over 3000 year old tradition of Dhrupad, the original form of classical Indian music, has been heard a lot over the millennia. Who listens while listening? What is Dhrupad? It becomes clear that it quickly becomes philosophical here.

Dhrupad is a living tradition that is passed on from teacher to student. A central element of Dhrupad is the exploration of tones, intermediate tones and the path from one tone to the next. When a monsoon raga, Rag Megh for example, forms a scale of 6 tones: Sa, Re, Ma, Pa, ni, Sa' this is the basic framework. There are countless phrasings between the notes. And instead of Sa', Re, Ma, Pa, ni, Sa, syllables can be used that are derived from the Bījamantra, for example. So it quickly becomes very complex. Learning Dhrupad is learning these countless techniques. A performance of a raga - I am reluctant to say performance, because of course we are not talking about a concert form, but about nada yoga - a performance is therefore a very structured meditation that only superficially resembles a jazz improvisation. No raga is the same.

If you now open yourself up to the world of Dhrupad, it is a completely different way of hearing. There are no right or wrong sounds. Creating a sound means producing it. Where does it come from? In singing, it starts with the breath, with the body, the sitting posture, a calm mind. Our voice is not a technical device. Making a sound is the vibration of the vocal cords. Finding the 'right' tone is a search on these vocal cords. Professionals are so fast and precise that a listener cannot hear them. But that's exactly what Dhrupad is all about. How do I produce a sound, do I approach it from below or above or from above to below? Do I circle it or hold it, do I emphasize it, draw it in or project it? So before I produce the first sound, I am actually already the mystery of the world. It's always about vibration - OM. Now that the first vibration is there, what happens next? How do I get to the next sound? What is sound? So it's not so much about the concept of music. It's nada yoga.

Language

I am naturally fascinated by the connection to language. Language is sound, mantras are knowledge in its most compact form, OM in its shortest form includes the breath, the speech apparatus, the chakras. Dhrupad traces this knowledge in the form of Nada Yoga, but is aware of its tool character. Just as pointing to something points to something and is not an end in itself (the pointing stick is not what it points to), knowledge in Dhrupad is beyond language and sound. The syllables of the Bījamantra are reduced in such a way that their linguistic reference is dissolved. What it is about cannot be expressed in language or music. The search for truth is a path, Nada Yoga one of its paths, Dhrupad its form. Dhrupad contains everything that is important, says Niloy.

You could also say it is pure deconstruction in the sense of postmodern philosophy.

Lists: https://archive.org/details/audio?query=dhrupad

What is a sacred space and what is not? In the meantime, I find it much easier to say what a sacred space is than to say what it is not.

I had always felt drawn to churches in Europe. Not to their iconography, because I always found the imagery of the Bible, a dead man on a cross, irritating. The 'sacred spaces' in the Christian world are primarily Catholic churches, because Protestant churches are by definition not sacred spaces, they are more like meeting rooms where a community comes together.

Catholic churches, or those built by Catholics, have a special aura of contemplation and silence. The sparse light, the vaults, the side aisles, the perspectives that open up in these spaces, the seclusion from civil society outside, the inside and outside, the inner and outer... all these elements have always attracted me. Time and again I went into churches, sat down for a few minutes and found peace. But there was always this cross, the guilt and forgiveness, death and despair that never let me stay there for long. For me, churches were always places of refuge for inner contemplation, no more, but also no less. My favorite thing in churches was when the organ was playing, then there was only the space and the vibration, the light, the perspective, the inside, so no material space and also no ideology or religion.

Temples in the Mediterranean region

My experience with temples in Italy, France, Greece and Egypt was completely different. In Greece and Egypt I only saw ruins, national monuments, tourist attractions. But still, the way they stand in the landscape was impressive. They are open to the elements, largely liberated from iconographic ideology by devastation and neglect, these sites are havens of a connection with nature, history, the cosmos, they bear witness to a bygone era and set the imagination free.

I think of Winkelmann and the Renaissance, the dramas of ancient Greece, the tombs of the pharaohs and hieroglyphics. These ruins are haunted by a spirit, as they say in German. This spirit of the pantheon of the gods of Olympus, which overlaps with those of the Egyptians and Romans, describes a different world. A world characterized by polytheism, mythological stories, contradictions and all-too-human conflicts. It is a mirror of social man, at least that is how I have always understood it, and I am probably not alone in this. It made sense to me that the human spirit mirrors itself in grand narratives to explore itself and share the experience. These stories then became stories of power and politics.

Temples in India

How different the temples in India are. They are alive, the tradition is anchored in the present. The gods have been worshipped since the time of the Vedas or even longer. The pantheon of gods is not a mirror of mankind, it is the origin. The gods represent the forces of the universe: physical forces, psychological and emotional forces, life forces and forces that we cannot yet name, because it would be silly to think we already know everything. So when I go to an Indian temple, it is a combination of experiences from Europe, enhanced by the experience of a living tradition that integrates different types of yoga. The Sutras are one thing, vibration is another. Vibration is the center of Indian spirituality. In the sound OM this is expressed. Matter and energy, consciousness, life are merely different forms of vibration. In Indian philosophy as interpreted by Sri Aurobindo, there are therefore 7 levels of existence: matter, life, rational mind, ideal knowledge, bliss, consciousness and pure existence. It makes no sense to try to understand Indian culture without recognizing this distinction.

When I enter a temple, I have the feeling that all these levels are activated. This activation of the holistic self is formed in the ancient temples in the form of the Vastupurusamandalas from. Vastu is the art of architecture, Purusa the primordial soul, Mandala the sacred geometric form. These three elements form the matrix of most of India's ancient great temples. So when I enter a temple, I enter a spiritual space. The temples are not a reflection of society and man's self-image, for many they are society in themselves and the core of human existence. They are based on a holistic knowledge that not only recognizes our 7 forms of existence, but also synthesizes the different forms of knowledge. Even at the time of the Veda, there was knowledge of art and music, Ayurveda, the sutras, various forms of yoga: karma (action), hatha (power), tantra (energy), bhakti (prayer), jnana (knowledge), raja (meditation).

Temples are personal universities of life.

Manifesto

Dance-film festival

28 Jul 2023 to 30 Jul 2023

https://auroapaar.org/festival/

What has actually manifested itself? The moving images that emerged from the latent images and 'came to life' in their sequence of at least 24 frames per second, these images of dancers who, according to their genre, were already at the beginning of cinematography, these images were shown at the Dance-Film Festival Manifest from July 28 to 30, 2023 at the Alliance Française in Pondicherry.

During the 2.5 days of the festival in the Alliance Française event room, 40 short films were shown. I actually just wanted to pop in and 'support' the first set of films, as I know they are often not well attended. I stayed for 2.5 days and watched every film, every live performance and, as far as the program allowed, attended the master classes. I was electrified. I only know such an intense art experience from big biennials or media festivals.

I kept asking myself what manifests itself here. Various media theories came to mind: Dziga Vertov's Kinoeye and the universal language of film, which is not bound to any language and enables the world to unite in the sense of a proletarian revolution. Or Godard's famous quote that the truth consists of 24 images per second and the media-critical theories derived from this, which deal with fictionality, lies and representation. And, of course, Gilles Deleuze and his homage to Henri Bergson's theory of the cinematographer. Deleuze turns Bergson's critique of film into a hymn of praise by understanding the technical quality of film editing as active thinking, as pure philosophy. But none of this, not even the theory of the moving image, seemed to me to grasp the phenomenon of this dance film festival.

A new genre?

Through their work, the organizers posed the question of whether a new genre is forming here. What is a genre? What is formed in which manifestation? Dance! An archaic form of expression that goes back to the animal kingdom, and at the same time one of the most complex, as it understands the whole body as a medium of expression. Dance is the movement of a body in space. The connection of body, space and time, interwoven through rhythm, is perhaps one of the most complex and challenging forms of expression for a 2-dimensional, linear medium such as film. The predetermined camera perspective, the frame of the image, the technical structure of the apparatus - all this works against dance. And so, for me, dance films have always been experimental or banal. Banal when it was simply a recording of a performance, experimental when individual segments of an otherwise continuous expression were expanded and contextualized through editing and montage and often ended in a rather cryptic sequence of movement intervals that could only be understood by insiders.

Perhaps I'll start very specifically, with the place where all this is taking place. An event room that is wonderfully suited as a movie theater. A stage in front of it. The festival is in Pondicherry, a former French colony in India, this colorful subcontinent with countless languages and traditions. This multicultural subcontinent, which was rather arbitrarily united by the British in 1947 through a national border, has chosen dance as one of its central, unifying cultural forms. There is a lot of dancing, at weddings and temple festivals, in Bollywood and at village festivals. Dance is omnipresent in many areas of society in India. It was therefore all the more surprising to see that no major Indian productions were represented in the festival program. Dance was live on stage. That says a lot, but more on that later.

Rasa

The root of Indian aesthetics lies in the concept of rasa, often translated as taste, but less in the sense of an artistic taste and more specifically in the sense of the senses of taste. The activation of the inner senses, which gives the sensory impressions a kind of quality. The outwardly directed senses see, touch or hear SOMETHING, focus on SOMETHING. The taste of sweet or sour is more of a quality of WHAT tastes sweet or sourit has the Feature to be sweet or sour. These qualities correspond to an inner sensual experience. This can be transmitted through the expressive power of theater, poetry, music and dance. In the Natya shastra there are the four basic principles of love/eroticism (Śṛngāram), heroism (Vīram), anger (Raudram) and disgust (Bībhatsam)). Someone loves, is a hero, is angry or disgusted. The whole thing becomes arbitrarily complex, the emotional characteristics differentiate themselves, colors and costumes are assigned to them and gods correspond to their powers, culminating in dance.

At this point, I just want to point out that at the core of this aesthetic, which is still the basis of traditional dance in India today, is the inner emotional state. This emotional state is embodied and manifests itself through the performers and evokes the same feeling in the viewer. This is the basis of aesthetic theory in India.

It goes against the tradition of European aesthetics since Plato, with its focus on representation. This retinal The idea that art takes place in the eye gave rise to central perspective, the camera and the cinematographer.

Moving pictures

So what happens when the camera's eye focuses on the dancers? How is a dancer's expression transferred to the screen? What new narrative forms are opened up by editing and montage? In his 1935 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility", Walter Benjamin saw the loss of aura through new media such as radio and film as by no means only negative. Editing and montage freed 'performing' artists from the constraints of a theater space and made it possible to visualize what could otherwise only be evoked in the imagination. To me, this historical starting point seems promising when it comes to the question of a new genre of dance film. To a certain extent, the theater has been liberated by film; in the USA, for example, it has been almost completely replaced by movie theaters. Significantly, Broadway theaters, i.e. musicals, which retain dance as one of their central principles, bucked this trend. They are still popular today. The experience of dance theater as a live experience is highly valued in almost all cultures that have a stage culture. Even MTV's music videos have not been able to do much to change this.

What became visible in Manifest is not a new phenomenon. However, the focus of Manifest was deliberately directed towards the fusion of film art and theater. The decision to only allow films that consciously exploit the medium of film in its artistic expressiveness was strategically correct. In this way, something became concentrated and visible. Perhaps a new genre. It is something different from "Singing in the Rain" or Wim Wenders' documentary "Pina Bausch", nor is it Michel Jackson's MTV videos or Bollywood's "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge". You could say that the 40 films selected at the festival were short films that chose dance as their language. An international language without words, as Dziga Vertov called for, and a language that contrasts the core of moving images, namely the language of movement. While Bergson and Godard accuse the cinematographer of lying, and Deleuze identifies truth purely in the materialized form of thought in film, the dance film attempts the impossible, the squaring of the circle: the concentration of film on movement as language in 3-dimensional space. This restrictive focus is tantamount to a manifesto, just like the numerous art movements of the avant-garde.

Room and screen

The Incubator Lab's hybrid film experiments were exciting. Dance choreographies were realized in films and performed on stage. The main aim was to feel the difference as an audience. What is the same and what is different? What works and what doesn't? The productions were small-scale experiments that invited reflection.

The festival catalog is available here: https://auroapaar.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/MANIFEST-2023-CATALOG.pdf

It's worth a look, I really liked the movies on the following pages: 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 19, 25, 26, 29, 30, 32, 34, 35, 37, 41, 42, 56

As far back as my memory goes, I remember that I always enjoyed listening to music. It is a matter of concentration, of enjoyment, of devotion, of self-dissolution. It was always a mystery to me what this power of music is, because it is very fleeting, ephemeral, it usually comes out of a loudspeaker. A technical device produces sound waves and the listener sinks into inner landscapes. What happens there? It is the Vibration. In the Kenaupani pity it became clear that the mixture of different vibrations constitutes consciousness.

I would like to try to differentiate this a little today. Starting from a meditative state, the question arises as to the qualitative constitution of this consciousness. In a state of high concentration, the sensory impressions from outside are reduced. It is not really possible to mute the outside world, but it is possible to concentrate in such a way that the sensory impressions are perceived as such in a first stage and are 'released' from consciousness in a second stage. It is not so much a phenomenological epoch in which the existence of the outside world is placed in an epistemic bracket, i.e. the question of its existence is kept open, but rather a withdrawal of attention. It is a dispassionate observation: Ah this impression is now present, or this thought comes, or that memory appears... Letting all these pass by as what they are is a first stage of meditation. In an inner vision, it then becomes clear how consciousness is constituted.

Inner rooms

A space filled with consciousness opens up. However, this does not react to sensory stimuli, but is pure and clear. This is where the forces of consciousness manifest: my body (matter), my breath (the life energy/prana), my mind (which analyses and visualizes), the experience of existence (rapture/ananda), pure consciousness (chit). In this consciousness, which is aware of its various levels, the self moves freely. Here the Self (Atman) meets the soul (Purusha) and realizes that consciousness itself, which encompasses everything (Brahman), is the Creator (Sat). This is where the forces of our world become visible as such: love, war, compassion, pleasure, beauty, suffering in all their forms. They are real in our consciousness and it makes little sense to deny them. We experience them, and we name them, and we communicate and share them, we live them out and realize them, they become very real forces in the world, working in them. All of this is undeniable. It is a little difficult to explain and that is why science often pretends that they are epiphenomenal, that they are merely insignificant side effects of physical processes. But this is not very wise, as it robs us of our own essence.

Music

I have expanded a little here because I think that this inner space has several antechambers, and art occupies many of these antechambers. In music, for example, I enter an inner space that is created by vibrations. I can move freely in it, because music helps me to let everything that is not music pass by. In this space, I can then go on inner journeys, which is why we always go into musical spaces when we are happy or sad. We relive past experiences and process them. These are fundamental psychological principles. But here too we can climb the ladder of consciousness. Our body and breath can be explored in dance, our mind can visualize the music, clarify its structure, bring its composition, execution, interpretation before the inner eye. But when I really concentrate and contemplate the music, as I now do best with Dhrupa of Bahauddin Dagar, then the music becomes pure sensuality (Rasa). And suddenly the question is no longer how a technical device can produce sound waves that can generate such a consciousness. This question belongs to the world of the rational mind. The music itself, the vibration with which my consciousness merges, opens up a different space, a space of simulation, contemplation, insight and light. Active listening to music is very close to deep meditation.

My aim is to give the experience its own space and not to grind it into reductionist contradictions. Music takes place in the antechambers of the meditative space. And this is almost identical for painting, sculpture, dance, architecture, literature and poetry etc... if I engage with their core qualities. It has its meaning here. The question of what music is has not been fully answered, but its function, its meaning, its effect is now a little clearer to me. It is no longer a mysterious secret, but a beautiful tool. It belongs to Saraswati.

Art, it now seems to me, is understood from here in India. And it is from here that Ananda Coomaraswamy's criticism of Western art is understood as 'retinal' clear.

Mimesis - Rasa - Representation - Expression - Thinking

Classical Antiquity

I have been trying for decades to avoid the pitfalls of ther to perceive and avoid Western art theory. I then spent many years in the realms of media theory, thinking about all possible forms of representation, about the character of information and the possibilities of interaction. It took me a long time to approach the sublime, until I finally arrived in India.

In classical antiquity, there are two important terms that can be applied to art: Mimesis and aisthesis. Mimesis is the principle of imitation. Plato said that when we imitate something that is already a lie, because the Shadow on the wall of the cave are mere appearances, so imitation is merely a lie of lies, and therefore dangerous. Aristotle was more 'modern' in this respect, for him mimesis is the living through of dramas, a catharsis is possible in the excitement and the experience of the resolution of conflicts, we can learn, even heal and grow in this way.

The second term, aisthesis, deals a little more deeply with perception itself. How do our senses perceive? What do our senses like? What feelings do they evoke? When is something sublime? This is about the structure of our perception, so it is more theoretical.

Both concepts, mimesis and aisthesis, usually lead to theories of representation: what is represented and how do we perceive it? It is usually based on a subject-object relationship in which the subject tries to understand the world as a counterpart, something that is outside of my self and can be understood through perception and mimesis. Language as a medium is helpful in this process, as are other forms of artistic media.

My basic problem was therefore that of representation, i.e. the representation of the world for the subject, expressed by a (different) subject. From the Renaissance onwards, the subject became more important, the expression of the self, i.e. art as self-expression, determined the modern concept of art. Art testified to the representation of an artistic 'genius' who emphasized his individual point of view. It is a somewhat more complex form of representation, but essentially the question of the art viewer has remained the same: What does the work represent?

The 5th Veda

14-15. He then thought: "I shall make a fifth Veda on the Nāṭya with the Semi-historical Tales (itihāsa), which will conduce to duty (dharma), wealth (artha) as well as fame, will contain good counsel and collection [of traditional maxims], will give guidance to people of the future as well, in all their actions, will be enriched by the teaching of all authoritative works (śāstra) and will give a review of all arts and crafts." https://www.wisdomlib.org/hinduism/book/the-natyashastra/d/doc202329.html#note-e-79660

In the period of a few centuries before and after the Common Era, central texts of Indian culture, the āgama (the book that describes the rule of temples in Tamil Nadu), Vāstu śāstra (principles of architecture) were written, the Kāma-sūtra (which describes the art of good living), Chitrasūtra (theory of painting and sculpture) and the Nāṭya śāstra (stage art), Viswakarma vastusästram (town planning), which describes the basis of art as a theory of rasa and many others.... An exact dating of all texts has not yet been possible.

Finding your way through this tangle is even more complicated than orienting yourself in classical antiquity. I am only referring to the broad outlines, not the technical discussions. All these texts refer to the tradition of the Vedas, and thus to the Hindu doctrine that the texts of the Vedas are divine.

The core idea is that Brahma, the creator of the universe, created it in order to experience himself. The self in the form of Atman and as the conscious self in the form of Purusha is part of Brahma, everything is Brahma, Brahma is everything. The realization of Brahma in man through Purusha enables a connection of our self with Brahma. This connection is possible in meditation, among other things. Here, consciousness can experience itself and receive the truth of Brahma. This was achieved by the rishis who passed on the received truth in the Vedas. Buddhism later rejected the idea that this knowledge is divine.

Central to this system of knowledge is that all consciousness is vibration, which does not contradict modern science. The Vibration is resonance, resonance, MixturesIn its purest form, this vibration is the syllable OM. Everything relates to this experience.

Of course, there are also discussions here about dualism (Dvaita) and monism (Advaita). But Advaita is the classical teaching. For me, it makes the most sense to compare Advaita with the concept of Immanence equate.

So when I try to immerse myself in the world of art theory from the time of the Vedas, the concepts of advaita (monism/immanence) and vibration (consciousness) are central for me. Rasa (taste, essence, mood) is a vibration that arises from this structure of thought.

Like everything in the ancient scriptures of the world of the Vedas, the whole thing is hyper-complex. The aesthetics are generally highly codified, everything has a meaning, every movement (32 Aṅgahāras), every hand position (24 mudras), every posture (108 Karaṇas), color, proportion, relation etc.... All of this has precisely defined meanings. It is the language of the gods, the laws are divine, there is little room for interpretation. What is visible in a work of art is a realization of these principles. Only when these are executed in the highest striving for perfection, with devotion and humility, only then do they have rasa - essence, taste, mood. For the gods wanted an object of distraction that would be audible and visible to all, and they asked Brahmā to create a Veda that would belong to all color groups. Brahmā created Nāṭyaveda by combining elements from the four existing Vedas. After its creation, Brahmā asked Indra to have the Nāṭyaveda performed by the gods, but Indra said that only sages who knew the secret of the Vedas and had fulfilled their vows were capable of cultivating and practicing it.

So 'traditional' Indian art is not about depicting the world. Nor is it about an artist expressing himself. It is - in the pure doctrine - solely about the realization of the divine principle. The descriptions of this principle are absurdly precise for Western senses. If one believes that these are divine principles, the discussion ends here as to why exactly it has this complexity. Otherwise, the question arises as to why everything was recorded so meticulously 2000 to 4000 years ago and why this tradition has remained almost unbroken to this day.

The source of art

Viewed on the surface, the countless ways in which art is expressed today, i.e. in its media, techniques, cultural circles, forms of expression and discourses, are confusingly colorful. Art is art because it moves us to perceive the world differently. That is perhaps the lowest common denominator. But then it stops there, because the world views associated with different art forms are extremely different.

So the question is, what is it that moves us? In mimesis, it is a simulation that is either a pure lie or can become a productive simulation space. As part of a philosophical discourse, art can make us discover new things and learn about our own nature. As rasa, art claims to express divine truths and thus help us to evolve. It is not a testimony to an afterlife or a story of salvation, but a manifestation of what makes us human, that is, it is a manifestation of consciousness.

In a profane but rich sense, this means that the human mind can expand its consciousness, cultivate it, train it, sharpen it. This development of consciousness manifests itself in the individual, in a culture, in an epoch. It's a bit absurd that all the materialists and capitalists run to the opera to celebrate the subtlety that they deny so much in everyday business life.

In a spiritual sense, one would think that it is unlikely that my level of consciousness represents the pinnacle of cosmic evolution. It would therefore be conceivable that consciousness is greater than what we generally associate with our brain on a neuronal level.

Thanjavur

Chola Temple Brihadeeswarar Temple 11th century.

Sculpture collection (here 8th-13th century) in the palace of the Thanjavur Nayak dynasty

" ' of 3 ' "

Images from Tiruchirappalli 3.5.2023:

• Sri Ranganatha Swamy Temple
• Sri Veera Anjaneya Temple
• Lalitankura Cave Temple and Rock Temple
• Tiruvanaikovil Arulmigu Jambukeswarar Akilandeswari Temple

Tiruchirappalli

Here in Auroville, a play was recently taken off the program by the hosts of the Bharat Nivas. The reason given was that some in the community had taken offense even before it was performed. This raises questions. What is art allowed to do, when is a ban justified? Linked to this is, of course, the question of what is the role of art, i.e. what should art do? The question invites us to think about the role of art in general, here in India and in the West. And because this very fundamental question extends not only across the Indo-European region, but also covers a whole range of different cultures, I would also like to give it a temporal dimension.

Let's start at the beginning, e.g. with the Classical Greeks. On the one hand, there is the question of beauty (form, function, and/or proportion), but on the other hand there is also the question of the role of art within philosophy (techne, mimisis, aisthesis). At its core, this constellation of concepts is about the relationship of the subject to the outside world as an object. How do people perceive the world, how and why do we imitate the world, e.g. in the theater or in sculptures? What techniques, what tools do we use to shape the world, to give it a function, or to work out beautiful, i.e. mathematical proportions? In other words, it is about the relationship between man and his environment in a formative relationship.

Art is created, brought forth, is the expression of a subject that shapes the world of objects. In Western art, we see the artist and his vision. Despite all the rapid developments in European art history, this has not fundamentally changed to this day.

'Indian' art is quite different. Classical Indian art expresses feelings that are universal. Feelings of spirituality, human emotions, forces at work in the world. The artist is secondary to the work of art, actually unimportant, because only what is expressed in the work of art counts, because it is a reflection of the forces at work in the cosmos. The artist has merely made them visible. And this is where the misunderstanding arises that the art of India is largely similar to the art of the European Middle Ages, as there was no artist there like in antiquity or the Renaissance. What is the difference?

Textuality and interpretation

There is an important difference. The Western eye, or ear, the Western mind, looks for what can be interpreted in the work of art. This can be an intrinsic quality such as beauty, or a technical mastery, an iconographic reference, the genius of the artist, an object that is part of a discourse, an object of reflection, or quite 'simply' an image, a representation or a depiction. The list could go on and on. Essentially, however, it is always a question of interpretation. If a work of art is the subject of a differentiated interpretation, then it is considered a successful, great work of art. If it is an object that triggers a response, it is suspected of being 'mere' design, handicraft or kitsch.

In this way, the West has produced a cultural landscape based on interpretation. And interpretation is ultimately a critical analysis in the medium of language, i.e. it is textual. The encounter with art is one of reflection on art. Contemplation, which is also a recurring theme in Western discourses on art theory, is a preliminary stage of this reflection. Contemplation is reflected upon and expressed afterwards and thus robbed of its power.

The sublime

The aesthetic experience that eludes these discursive tendencies enters the realm of the sublime, the sublime, a realm of secular transcendence, i.e. the limits of language. For the limit of the textual is also part of the discourse, only as a demarcation and reference to the unspeakable. However, Western art theory usually leaves it at this reference. To continue talking about what cannot be said would be paradoxical. And so the viewer in the West goes to art temples, museums and galleries, churches and archaeological sites, urban places or nature in order to interpret what is presented there, or to fall silent before the unspeakable.

In traditions based on monotheistic religions, art therefore takes on the role of narrative, i.e. the story of the religion is told. The spiritual power of art is subject to an increasing process of abstraction. Art is becoming increasingly secular, materialistic, capitalistic, whereas religion is becoming increasingly strikingly transcendent. Religion refers to an afterlife where personal life finds a continuation. Of course, this hereafter cannot be experienced, cannot be expressed, but at the same time it is conceived as a reflection of our reality, albeit idealized.

There are therefore different forms of representations of reality. And so art is robbed of its power of wonder. It becomes a 'narrative culture', a culture of representation and the subject of various cultural techniques; it becomes part of the logos. Yet there is a clear desire to approach the unspeakable, the sublime. For this unspeakable does not elude experience, it just cannot be grasped by the rational mind. The problem lies in the fact that the rational mind follows the logic of a systematization of the world through the Logos. In the West, the idea prevails that the Logos can explain the world and that other ways of accessing the world are inferior to this Logos and must first be systematized by it: this applies, for example, to intuition, feeling, consciousness, the experience of the self and the experience of that which transcends the self. These phenomena are understood as unenlightened in Western culture. And so a desire for the sublime arises, which is demonized as unenlightened. Culture suppresses. For Freud, culture is sublimated sexuality. There is something in the description for the West.

Brahman

In Indian art, it seems to be the other way around. Indian art produces something that eludes language. Tradition speaks of rasa¹a vibration in perception that is often translated as taste, but not in the sense of a good taste in art, but in the sense of a quality that is evoked by a work of art. This vibration in the artwork creates a vibration in the viewer and connects the inner self of the viewer with the quality evoked in the artwork, which in turn is testimony to a force behind the superficial reality.

In Indian philosophy, the basic idea prevails that Brahman, the supreme being that encompasses everything, wants to experience itself. It is only for this reason that Brahman emerges from perfect existence and unfolds in the physical world. The cycle of the world, the world soul, the individual consciousness, the universal forces, all this is Brahman experiencing itself. Brahman is therefore inconceivable for us, we are part of Brahman, Brahman is within us, everything is Brahman. The role of art here is to represent some of these forces. Art makes the viewer wonder. A quality that is expressed in the work of art is captured as rasa. It cannot be expressed directly in language. The statue of a god is an expression of a quality, a force in the cosmos that has become tangible (tangible, palpable). The fact that the viewer and the artist evoke a rasa through the work of art means that this perception, the consciousness, the experience, the vibration of consciousness there is.

Existence

What does Dasein mean here? Existence should not be understood here in a dualistic sense, as if a quality in a work of art is perceived by a viewer and this quality is present in the work of art. Rather, existence here means that a force of the cosmos, a part of Brahman, has unfolded and become visible. Visible not in the sense that a viewer sees something in a work of art, but that a force shows itself in a work of art and evokes a rasa in the viewer that allows him to participate in the force. This is why the statues of the gods in India are animated. The gods are in them. When the powers are appeased through worship - puja - then they are there. Devotion to the universal principle is bhakti, it also defines an attitude in the relationship between the ritual object and the worshippers. The observer does not interpret or judge an external object, but the soul surrenders to the gods. This surrender is facilitated by a medium, a work of art.

In India, art is still part of the cosmic cycle, part of Brahman, it is animated, just as the whole cosmos is animated. Temples, statues, poems, dance, music are part of the cosmos, part of the cosmic forces, they are part of Brahman, and they enable the viewer to see aspects of Brahman more clearly, more vividly, more alive. Art means being able to wonder, to taste what is otherwise difficult to find - Rasa². Brahman is present in Indian art. The existence of art is the presence of cosmic forces, gods as they say here.

Back to the initial question: What is art allowed to do?

I now ask myself what these considerations mean for the freedom of expression in art? In the Western tradition, it is self-evident that the discursive nature of art not only allows for a culture of debate, but also generates and cultivates it. Criticism, disagreement, satire and censorship are part of the cultural industry, and exploring the boundaries is part of the practice. But what is the role of satire in Indian art, for example? What aspect of Brahman is realized here? Can't everything be shown? Even the gods laugh and cry, are angry or heroic.

I have a question here: in the West, art is often part of political culture. Politics is brought onto the stage and art intervenes in society and politics. In the 20th century, art was called upon to take its responsibility in society more seriously and to participate in political discourse. But does this also apply to art in India, a subcontinent torn by colonialism? India, with its many languages, cultures and religions, is such a colorful, tolerant country that feeds on a connection to spirituality in whatever form. To date, the world's largest democracy has largely granted freedom of expression. But when I talk to cultural representatives here, many point to the tradition of the role of art in promoting spiritual growth. Here in the country, I rarely hear that art has a political mission.

At the same time, however, many critical voices were heard at the Kochi Biennale, for example. Much of the art there took a very clear political stance on current issues such as the climate crisis, equal rights, the persecution of minorities, exploitation and corruption. I was very familiar with the artistic language of these positions, which was based on Western forms of expression.

These two worlds collide in India. The triumph of capitalism and its secular, i.e. materialistic structure does not stop at India. It remains to be seen whether the instruments of this culture industry will help to save the victims of this very culture industry. Traditionalists are trying to protect themselves from these colonial structures by rejecting modernity. This is perceived in the West as backward and conservative.

The culture war is also in full swing here in Auroville. If there is currently talk of a new global order in 2023, it is also about this culture war.

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Exhibition "Roots From the Sky" by Cedric Bregnard at Centre d'Art, Auroville March 2023

Cedric Bregnard is Artist in Residence at the Centre d'Art in Auroville. He will be taking a photo of the Banyan tree in the Matrimandir garden over the next 2 months. This photo will then be scaled to the size of a wall (approx. 3x7m) in the gallery. Residents of Auroville are invited to trace light and shadow on the bark, leaves, roots, with ink on the wall. What lies behind this process is complex and touches on the essence of photography, the materiality of trees and the power of life. The tree itself is the geographical center of Auroville and represents a very special place for many people, a place of contemplation, concentration and meditation. For many, this tree is more than just a symbol of nature, man and the cosmos. It manifests something.

So what is it all about? Let's start with photography, because Cedric Bregnard is a photographer. In 1998, as the final project of his studies at the Ecole de Photographie de Vevey, Bregnard photographed the deceased. He took several months to accompany four people in a palliative clinic in Switzerland on their final journey. They consented to Cedric Bregnard taking a photo of them. After life had left the body, he took three hours alone with the deceased, a kind of wake, to then take exactly one photo, the only photo, of the body - a portrait. The arc that is drawn here is existential: What is the transition from life to death? What is a portrait? What can photography represent? What exactly happens when a photograph captures a moment - technically, temporally, metaphysically?

Photographs are technical images. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the first photograph in 1826. Louis Daguerre further developed the photochemical process to patent maturity in 1839, and it was the brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière who invented the cinematograph in 1895. This device made it possible to both shoot and project films. The life-size moving image projections replaced the magic lantern and phantasmagoria.

In 1907, Henri Bergson criticized the cinematograph in his book Creative Evolution as an apparatus that produces illusory images. The sequence of individual images that create the illusion of movement is ultimately a lie. Plato argued similarly: painting is a lie, because you can't eat a painted apple. In 1985, Deleuze 'rescued' cinema from the accusation of lying by arguing that although the criticism was correct, it was short-sighted. The film strip contained more than just individual images, it was not the illusion of movement, but pure thought, was material philosophy. The cuts and collages allow for streams of thought that only film is capable of. Film is not 'truth 24 times a second' (Godard), but pure philosophy. The Elan Vital (Bergson), i.e. the life force that the cinematographer lacks, is expanded by the power of thought.

Latent images

Cedric Bregnard's performances implicitly relate to this discussion, albeit with a markedly different tone. After all, it is about how photography can transcend the technical image.

So let's go back to the beginning of photographic images. Light rays are captured using photochemical processes. A latent image is created, i.e. there is a light imprint in a chemical film on a carrier material. The latent image becomes visible when the transparent chemical compounds altered by the light are replaced by colored chemical compounds. With Daguerre, this was still silver on a glass plate. Kodak film, however, made working with negatives popular and inexpensive. The negatives could be enlarged efficiently in a large laboratory. We generally refer to these prints as photographs. So it is nature that 'paints' here, the light is captured with the help of an apparatus and made visible through chemistry. The photographer merely chooses the place, the time and the detail.

In Bregnard's process and his achievements, there is a very significant shift within this 'painting of nature'. He too chooses a place, the time and the detail - i.e. an object - specifically a tree - which he photographs with a camera. Instead of using a photochemical process, however, he uses a very high-resolution digital process. The pixels, which function somewhat like a latent image, are made visible by printing them on paper. The mathematical description of each pixel is transformed into a graphical representation using an algorithm and a printer. Most photographers who work digitally take these printouts as their final results. They are the equivalent of analog prints, i.e. photographs.

Making visible together

Bregnard works somewhat more finely. For him, the expressions are quasi negatives. An intermediate stage to the final image. The deduction of this negative is created in the performance. And this is where it gets a little magical.

The 'negative' that Bregnard prints is black and white without gray values. This means that every light reflex captured by the camera is set to either black or white, 'light or shadow'. This negative serves as the basis for the performance. Anyone can now take part and trace the traces of light and shadow. The image of the tree is collectively traced with ink. A nice detail here is that the ink is made from charcoal, which in turn is charred wood - a dead tree.

The collective tracing with ink itself is a process that Bregnard 'lets run'. He takes himself out of it. Again, it is nature that draws here. Nature in the sense of contrast to technology. But it is a higher form of nature, it is consciousness in the collective. The fact that this process is now taking place here in Auroville in relation to the Banyon tree is wonderful. That this is happening at a time when Auroville's driving force 'Diversity in Unity' is undergoing a test of strength may not be merely symbolic for some.

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Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1911.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. 9th print. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

---. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

"Cedric Bregnard | Cedric Bregnard". Accessed February 10, 2023. https://www.cedricbregnard.ch/.

I was socialized in the divided Germany of the 80s. It was a time of maximum nuclear threat, nuclear winter was a daily possibility. It was the time of the Cold War, ideological bloc thinking. Capitalism or communism were the two options. Capitalism went hand in hand with a Protestant work ethic, communism with existentialist materialism. The rest was considered esoteric.

It wasn't easy to find your way around as a teenager. I lived in the West, the capitalist side, and if I showed an interest in communism, I immediately heard: then go over there. German guilt made things even more difficult. The Holocaust could not be forgotten, the guilt of the Germans had to be kept in our consciousness. We all bore the guilt, if not personally, then as a cultural community. How could 'German' culture bring about the Third Reich? The intellectual debates in post-war Germany revolved around this question. Can we identify something that led to this catastrophe? How can we look for it, and once we have found it, what can we learn from it? In philosophy, the Frankfurt School was the most prominent. To this day, Habermas is the intellectual conscience of Germany.

Negative dialectics

The essence of the argument is as follows: The German Enlightenment (Kant) gave wings to rational thinking. This rationality, still shackled by the categorical imperative in Kant, developed the momentum of modernity, a blind belief in progress was unleashed, which actually continues unabated to this day. Under National Socialism, this belief in progress was perverted by a racial theory, an ideology of master race. However, their instruments of power, war and concentration camps were 'perfected' in the sense of cold rationality. The gruesome example of this are the gas chambers of Auschwitz, which were technically effective, but were nothing more than the most brutal extermination camps of a systematic mass murder of all those who did not fit into the image of the 'master race'.

Negative dialectics subjected modernist thinking to radical criticism. Kant's table of categories was no longer the foundation on which an enlightened society could be built, but became a symbol of rationalist totalitarianism. The consequence was a philosophy that only knew criticism. Everything is questioned with regard to its totalitarian structures and left open to discussion. Adorno's infinite critical differentiation of the concept is exposed to discourse by Habermas. Only that which is accepted by consensus is valid. If there is no consensus in a society, there must be further discussion...

Beauty and delight

What kind of aesthetics should be derived from this for 'my' generation? Terms such as beauty and sublimity were of course taboo. They were branded as totalitarian, as they seemed to be based on a subjective and authoritarian feeling that defied rational justification and was not capable of consensus in discourse. A critical aesthetic appeared 'politically correct', i.e. an avant-garde that questioned everything that had gone before and replaced it with a new 'critical' position. Beauty in art became suspect, the critical stance its surrogate.

And yet these aesthetic positions bordered on the sublime in their exaggerations: Mark Rothko, John Cage, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Pina Bausch, Bill Viola, Lucio Fontana... a long list of artists could be drawn up, which is of course influenced by my personal taste. The sublime here is not a show of the divine, but an aesthetic borderline experience.

Hymn of Creation

It took me a very long time to open myself up to a critically reflected concept of the sublime. My entire intellectual training resisted it. And only art that leads to an aesthetic borderline experience, which is not representative of its subject, allowed me to experience and name what I experience there as sublime: a white canvas, for example, cut through with a scalpel, the opening of which allows me to look behind it. Lucio Fontana's (1899-1968) 'Cut paintings' - they are sublime.

This reminds me of the Hymn of Creation (Rig Veda X.129). It begins with:

Aurobindo writes in "The Soul of Poetic Delight and Beauty":

"The earliest surviving poetry of ancient India was philosophical and religious, the Veda, the Upanishads, and our modern notions tend to divorce these things from the instinct of delight and beauty, to separate the religious and the philosophic from the aesthetic sense; but the miracle of these antique writings is their perfect union of beauty and power and truth, the word of truth coming out spontaneously as a word of beauty, the revealed utterance of that universal spirit who is described in the Upanishads as the eater of the honey of sweetness, madhvadam puruṣamand this high achievement was not surprising in these ancient deep-thinking men who discovered the profound truth that all existence derives from and lives by the bliss of the eternal spirit, in the power of a universal delight, Ananda"(CWSA 26, p.255)

How, I ask myself, can I get my rational thinking to open up to this view? Can I follow the spiritual path of the Upanishads without getting caught up in totalitarian thinking?

The hymn ends with:

What would the world look like without the focal point of a lens? Our eyes have a lens that concentrates the light and focuses it on a plane so that the retina can record this focused image - as an image in a plane. The light rays are captured by receptors and transmitted to the brain. This vibration of the nerve cells is transcribed into another vibration, that of consciousness. This principle was copied in the camera obscura and the cinematograph and forms the basis of classical photography and film or video recordings.

So what would a world look like that is perceived by a consciousness that has no lens interposed in visual perception? The room would be flooded with light, colors would be visible, but there would be no spatial depth, no objects. How would a consciousness orient itself in it?

Senses

A newborn baby's eyes are still closed for the first few days. First of all, it has to become aware of its own body, gross and fine motor skills, hunger, pain, tiredness. All this comes first. The senses of sight, touch and hearing come later. The boundaries between one's own body and the outside world must be explored. Is the object in your hand part of your own body or not? How does the feeling of hunger relate to the milk bottle? All these perceptions are possible without visual representation. Object recognition is largely based on motor skills, taste and touch. In other words, very direct.

The perception of what is not in direct physical contact comes later via smell, sight and hearing. That which is far away must somehow present itself to me. The contact is physical, light waves, sound waves, odors. They arrive at the sensory organs at different speeds and leave an impression there, they inscribe themselves in the senses, a resonance, a rhythm, a fusion or intermission takes place. In the case of smell and hearing, the senses are directly exposed to the vibrations. Although the sense of hearing, the sense of smell and the sense of taste are quite complex, as the perceived vibrations have to be processed by the brain, none of these organs are as complicated as the eye.

Are the problems of Western philosophy retinal?

The eye therefore creates an image. This is the root of representation. Which of these representations are physical reality, the living world, art? It seems to me that most questions in philosophy arise from this retinal process. The question of representation is therefore at the center of Western aesthetics. Attempts to understand representation as the basis of aesthetic and epistemological philosophy lead down all kinds of wrong paths. They lead to a philosophy that understands the world as objects that are presented to us. This has consequences not only for art, but also for economics, politics, society, science...

In Indian aesthetics, it is rasa, a completely different approach. It is about a state of consciousness that is facilitated by sensory stimuli. The aim of art is to enter and remain in this state. Art opens a gateway to higher consciousness - Satchitananda. The origin lies in the Vedas. Rasa is the taste, rasa is not retinal. Rasa is the essence.

Literature:

Yesterday I met with a gallery owner in Pondicherry. I want to learn more about the artists in the region, the inspirations, the artistic practice, the visual language, the spiritual depth, the narratives, the studios, the biographies, the temples they visit. At the same time, I am discussing a video format with some Aurovillians about the art landscape around Auroville. My training as a Western art historian is not always helpful, there is so much I have to forget first - 'unlearning'. I have always told my students the same thing: forget what you have learned in the survey lectures, that is the history of the victors and ideologues. Art is something else. Well, now I'm learning a little about myself, I'm being reminded and encouraged, I'm reaching my limits.

The conversation yesterday didn't open my eyes, but my senses. Again and again, it is the Upanishads that are the key. I often feel like a novice. Every serious conversation I have here brings to light many new concepts that I don't know. This gives my conversation partner an idea of how deeply I have delved into the Vedic scriptures, the meaning of the temples, the code of the Agama I got in. And of course I have to admit that I'm really only scratching the surface. But it becomes roughened, more permeable, dust and seeds collect in its scratches and traces, it starts to sprout.

My idea of art rejects the concept of representation. Kriti, my conversation partner yesterday, spoke of a retinal attitude in this context. European discussions are always only about what happens on the retina, not about what happens behind it. The vibration of the senses, the fire of cognition, the states of consciousness beyond the material navigation of physical reality.

At the same time, she says that India is often about visual storytelling. How does that fit together?

Body without organs

I think of Deleuze Logic of Sensation, how the eye merges with the canvas, the ear sees better, the forces of distorted bodies become visible on the canvas. And how the artist Francis Bacon's final splash of color at the end of the artistic process exposes the work to intuitive, cosmic, random processes to either complete or destroy the work. Deleuze talks about vibration, about surrender, about the fluid boundaries of the physical body, but also about a body without organs. His thinking is not so far removed from the Kena Upanishads. Elsewhere, Deleuze writes about 'body without organs' (bwo):

"Inscribed on the plane of consistency are haecceities, events, incorporeal transformations that are apprehended in themselves; nomadic essences, vague yet rigorous; continuums of intensities or continuous variations, which go beyond constants and variables; becomings, which have neither culmination nor subject, but draw one another into zones of proximity or undecidability; smooth spaces, composed from within striated space. We will say that a body without organsor bodies without organs (plateaus) comes into play in individuation by and haecceity, in the production of intensities beginning at a degree zero, in the matter of variation, in the medium of becoming or transformation, and in the smoothing of space. A powerful nonorganic life that escapes the strata, cuts across assemblages, and draws an abstract line without contour, a line of nomad art and itinerant metallurgy.
Does the plane of consistency constitute the body without organs, or does the body without organs compose the plane? Are the Body without Organs and the Plane the same thing? In any event, composer and composed have the same power: the line does not have a dimension superior to that of the point, nor the surface to that of the line, nor the volume to that of the surface, but always an anexact, fractional number of dimensions that constantly increase or decrease with the number of its parts. The plane sections multiplicities of variable dimensions. The question is, therefore, the mode of connection between the different parts of the plane: To what extent do the bodies without organs interconnect? How are the continuums of intensity extended? What is the order of the transformational series?" (Deleuze A 1000 Plateaus p. 507)

I think that the very broad Term 'body without organ' helps here. The Upanishads are essentially about the relationship between Brahman and the world. In order to experience itself, Brahman creates a self (atman), a consciousness (purusha), which is realized through nature (prakriti). The physical world is a habitat for the forces that emerge from Brahman - in Hinduism as gods. The configuration of this reality is Brahman, which experiences itself. Brahman is Atman, unity and diversity are not opposites, they contain each other.

There is a parallel in the orientation towards a philosophy of immanence a non-dualistic philosophy. How is the complexity of consciousness to be recognized as immanence? Aurobindo's first answer would be that rationality is not capable of this. It must be transcended, transcended. Only by giving up the small self, the ego, do truly meaningful experiences become possible. The states of Satcitananda allow us to participate in the unfolding of consciousness. It is this unfolding that Deleuze describes materially. What Aurobindo describes through the differentiation of consciousness, Deleuze describes through the movements and connections of thought and the senses.

Storytelling

So I ask myself, what kind of stories are these? What stories are being told? My impression is that many works by contemporary artists in India are not about telling autobiographical stories, even though their own experience and biography often clearly resonate. But that is not the issue. It is not about asking what the artist:in us wanted to say with it. That's why the Tasmai Gallery no explanatory text, not even names, titles etc... The works are simply on the wall, standing for themselves.

The images do not represent a story. It is true that in India, as in every cultural tradition, there are narratives of mythological, religious or imperial character that form the fabric of a 'cultural fabric'. In India, the many figures from the epics and temples are omnipresent. But it is difficult for everyone to always decipher them. There are so many local traditions, the subcontinent is huge, that it is not so much a question of Indians or non-Indians being able to decode the visual language. It is the artists' personal exploration of their own experience. These narratives are designed to allow points of connection - a rhizome, a plateau, a level.

When I see a work that may seem a little naive at first glance, I find myself thinking and categorizing retinally in my Western mind. Missed the mark ... Second attempt. What experience is being felt here? How does my eye move? How does my body move, where do I linger, where does a connection arise between my experience and what I see? What mental images arise in my mind, what spiritual experience is evoked? These are the questions that point me in the right direction.

What is happening here on an empirical level? The art historian in me wonders, how can I talk about this? Experiences of Satchitananda are difficult to communicate. I then fall back on Deleuze. The ear sees better. The logic of sensory experience is a logic that is not a logic. It is not a propositional logic, it is not about true or false. Nevertheless, it is not random, arbitrary. The senses are held together by vibration, and this is where the Kena Upanishad continues. Who thinks when thinking, who sees when seeing?

"That is full; this is full. The full comes out of the full. Taking the full from the full the full itself remains.
Aum, peace, peace, peace." (Invocation of Isha Upanishad)

Art is fundamentally misunderstood, especially by experts, art historians and critics. Art is not about what it represents or what it means. Art is not a riddle to be deciphered, nor is it an expression of artistic genius that can be explained by the artist's biography. Art is also not necessarily beautiful, or aesthetic, or sublime.

Representation

Art is not Representationthat is the great misunderstanding of modernity. It was this misunderstanding that gave rise to the avant-garde. Its aim was to constantly invent new forms of representation, to express new phenomena for the first time. I am thinking of the subconscious, the concept of four-dimensional space, synaesthetic perception, functionalism, enthusiasm for technology. These and many other phenomena from the 20th century became the 'subject' of art. If something is the 'object' of art, then art represents this 'object', it depicts it - according to conventional art theory. The understanding of art on which this is based is one that is attached to the belief in progress, postulates an objective development of a history of art and is based on principles of rational historiography. All these approaches have a certain explanatory power within a limited framework. They shed light on certain aspects. However, they misunderstand the nature of art.

If I go so far out on a limb and attack the common art discourses of the West in one paragraph, I must of course also briefly say what I would like to counter. These are some essays by Roland Barthes, a great semiotician or semiologist and French art critic. His texts show the limits of what can be represented in art. And of course I am thinking of Gilles Deleuze, who thought much further and more radically and characterized art as an encounter. I associate him with a radical critique of the dogma of the representational theory of art. Art actually has nothing at all to do with representation. The idea that something stands for something else is actually absurd. It leads to all the problems of dualism, its paradoxes and illusory problems. A text, a picture, a composition, a play, an opera or a sculpture, even a photograph, they all represent nothing. Rather, they are very special things in the world that give us a very special experience. The fact that they are sometimes similar to other things is trivial and hardly interesting.

Encounter

When I say that art is an encounter, or makes it possible, it means that the artworks are the result of a creative process. The difference between the artist as the producer of works and the viewer as the recipient is much smaller than is generally assumed. Art is not an object of communication between artist and viewer. Nor is art a medium between a sender and a receiver. Nor is art a sign that can be decoded.

Art is art. Let's try not to immediately reduce it to something. Art is created and becomes part of the world. It has an effect, just like everything else in the world. There are very different modes of action, I am thinking here a little of Schopenhauer's fourfold root of the law of sufficient cause. I vary freely: there is mechanical causal effect, there is the dynamic of living, i.e. biological systems and there is social interaction as an effect, there is inspiration and creativity. Their modes of action are different. I would like to claim here that they are irreducible.

Art is art. It is produced and is part of a context. We can encounter it. Encountering art is not only reserved for humans. Some animals also have it, albeit to a limited extent, and perhaps artificial intelligence will also make progress in this area.

With Deleuze we learn that:

• the Cinematograph creates and plays a movie that manifests thought (Deleuze 'Cinema').
• Art for us is not only like is a house, but a house is. As humans, we stand between earth and heaven - the cosmos. In this tension, we need a boundary, a home. We need a territory that we call ours, and we need to be able to leave it, to deterritorialize and reterritorialize. Art has a very important role to play here. In the encounter with others, with the earth and the cosmos, we build a house, that is the basic principle of art. We inhabit the house, visit other houses. Of course, this is meant both literally and metaphorically (Deleuze 'What is Philosophy').
• When we encounter art, our senses merge with the art itself. Our eyes, ears, taste and touch vibrate when we come into contact with vibrating art (Deleuze 'Logic of Sensation').

What Deleuze avoids, and only hints at in his last essay 'Immanence: A life', is a spiritual component. Part of our being-in-the-world is our relationship to the great questions of meaning. A life that is aware of itself - if not fully, then richly - sees itself as part of a whole. This relationship also becomes a theme in art. We can encounter the power of creation. With Aurobindo, art has the ability, Bhakti i.e. to be a medium of devotion - an encounter with the divine - not in the form of a representation of the divine as in Christianity, but as an object of meditation that facilitates the path of bhakti in contemplative devotion.

I am interested in the relationship between Deleuze's concept of art as a house and Aurobindo's concept of art as bhakti in the temples. There seems to me to be a parallel here. Both lead from the dead end of representation to a concept that does more justice to spiritual experience.

Here is a link to a long Presentation (35MB) with material on the question of why I, as an art historian, read Deleuze.

There was a time when a Studium Generale was part of the academic world. I did it for a few semesters. The idea of a systematic science always seemed somewhat absurd to me. 

In my philosophy studies after the intermediate examination in Heidelberg, I became more systematic, but I was still a 'colorful dog' in the seminar. I always found counterexamples or strange observations that contradicted the theories. That was invigorating for the discussions in the seminars. I was argumentative and didn't give up easily. However, I didn't have much to counter the power of systematic thinking in the tradition of German idealism in the long run, and so I took refuge in aesthetic theory. 

Aesthetic theory

Everything that is perceptible is potentially the subject of aesthetic theory. The more colorful, the better. However, here too I was caught up in the systematic and analytical way of thinking. We were reading modern thinkers, not postmodernists. Art history had remarkably little to contribute to the discussions. And so I surrendered to the idea of the avant-garde. A new idea quickly became an old one and was replaced by an even more radical one.

The tragedy of this movement, which is often (mis)understood as progress, is the analytical reduction. Mystical thinking becomes mythical, then enlightened and finally critical thinking. The object of art is reduced from the cosmos to the religious/ideological, then to the scientific and finally to the critical, sometimes cynical. The semiotic reduction was followed by a compositional reduction, then a reduction to the act of perception, a further reduction to the idea (concept). This process of analysis, fragmentation and resynthesis was accelerated by media theory. It was accompanied by the development of printing technology, photography, film, video, computers, AI...

The divisive power of science (scienzia) reduces the act of creativity to finding new elements. The 'ism' of art history: Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Symbolism, Dadaism etc... Isolate forces of creativity and radicalize them until they have found an expression.

This brief outline is of course a trivializing, radical abbreviation. Art also became richer through the inclusion of phenomena from the social sciences, psychology and the natural sciences. Inter- and transdisciplinary approaches led artists into laboratories, politics, the streets and activism. Individual forces such as 'the spiritual in art', kinetics, synaesthesia, geometry, emotion, kitsch - all this and much more was concentrated, distilled and mixed. 

Thought pictures

To me, the different art movements always seemed to represent different ways of thinking. I really thought that! I thought that the original reason lay in thinking. I shared the idea of the great Western philosophers that philosophical systems are just that: Systems that provide different interpretations of a reality that cannot itself be explained. In other words, the idea that only a representation of the world can be created within thought, but that the world itself is not accessible.

I was therefore always suspicious of the assumption that art is an act of creation, i.e. that it is creative. How could a subject be a creator if it was understood rationally? That sounds naïve, but it is actually only honest. The West talks about 'creative' artists in a materialistically and capitalistically oriented conception of the world in which the sacred, the sacred, the divine has no significant value. The subject is thus stylized as the creator, who is granted a creation that is denied to the divine. It seemed to me that this contradiction could only be resolved one-sidedly. I opted for the rational, which seemed more coherent within Western culture. 

Within this way of thinking, art then takes on the role of a representation or perhaps even that of a laboratory where new experiences can be made. In postmodern discourses, the power of art - to be able to reach the world beyond thought through the sublime - is radically expanded. In deconstruction, post-structuralism and the rhizome, the world opens up beyond systematic patterns of thought. The systems are transcended, so to speak (even if the main proponents would probably strongly object to this). In the brutal distortions, the search beyond the signs, in the free combination of the incompatible, something new emerges. This is where I felt at home for the first time. To this day, I find comfort and inspiration in Deleuze's writings.

But only now am I really beginning to see. Because this whole movement of thinking within the rational does not lead very far. The limits of the rational are quickly reached. Then come the warning signs: Beware, this is not scientific, or cannot be justified. 

How can thinking and the world be reconciled? This question shows the arrogance of this tradition of thought. The world is faced with a small thinking mind that wants to grasp the entire cosmos with all its fascinations. And the whole thing is only based on itself. It's actually so stupid that I wonder why I didn't see it much earlier. And why did the so-called 'great thinkers' who knew this not say it more prominently, but hide it in little posthumous notes (see Kant and Hume, for example)?

The way out of this dilemma is to take a broader view of our being than simply reducing it to rational thinking. We must allow ourselves to understand ourselves as matter and life, as consciousness and rational mind, as intuitive and spiritual. Only if we allow the complex inner images that interweave these and other levels can we understand ourselves as part of a reality that includes us, and the images that arise there are substantially different. They require a completely different language.

I found the following quote from Aurobindo today:

"A certain difficulty arises for our mind in reconciling these different faces or fronts of the One Self and Spirit, because we are obliged to use abstract conceptions and defining words and ideas for something that is not abstract, something that is spiritually living and intensely real. Our abstractions get fixed into differentiating concepts with sharp lines between them: but the Reality is not of that nature; its aspects are many but shade off into each other. Its truth could only be rendered by ideas and images metaphysical and yet living and concrete, - images which might be taken by the pure Reason as figures and symbols but are more than that and mean more to the intuitive vision and feeling, for they are realities of a dynamic spiritual experience." (The Life Devine p.372)

It seems to me that this is an indication of a different understanding of art. I will look into it.

Centre D'art "The Divine Seed" by artist Saravana Deivasegamani 6-20 January 2023

In Saravana Deivasegamani exhibition 'Devine Seeds' at the beginning there are 9 bronze objects on the floor. They are in the center and represent 9 grains that are just beginning to sprout. Navadhanyam is the title of this work. Hindu temples have vessels on the roof-usually made of copper-filled with seeds. Every 12 years, the seeds in these kalasams are replaced. It is there in case there is ever a severe natural disaster, and the seeds are needed for reconstruction. The 9 different seeds are called Navadhanyam. They are a widely used as offerings. Saravana Deivasegamani has symbolically brought them down from the temple roof, the grains of Kalasam sprout now. We live in a time where this seems to have become necessary. At least symbolically - because our planet is not in good shape.

We see this in Tamil Nadu with the Palmyra palm. This palm tree, which is part of the identity of Tamil Nadu, is an endangered species in Tamil Nadu now. It grows very, very slowly and gives way to the so-called civilization. The 2.35-meter-high sculpture 'Beginning of all Things' is mainly made of palmyras seeds attached to an iron and copper construction. On the palm trees leaves the Tirukkural was written. This classic work of Tamil culture from the 5th or 6th century consists of 1330 double verses and contains the wisdom for the right way of life.

It is this vitality of tradition, wisdom and spirituality that is felt in Saravana Deivasegamani works. The imagery comes from a place of meditation, from the heart, a connection with nature. The sculpture 'Beginning of Things' is juxtaposed with 'Outburst of Joy'. The 65 cm high sculpture stands for itself with its title, from the root grows an organic structure, symbol of life. Trees are sacred for Saravana Deivasegamani.

A few months ago, Saravana Deivasegamani bought online a pair of digital glasses for welding. These glasses go dark only for the fraction of a second it takes to set the welding point. Saravana Deivasegamani worked as a metal craftsman before coming to gallery art. The filigree works like 'Small Joys' or 'Private Signs' consist of thousands of welding points.

Many of his works were created without these glasses. The approach then is different. The 'pointillistic' welding work is created with closed eyes. You must imagine this for a moment. Every time a mark is made, the artist must close his eyes. It is the opposite of Impressionism, which was entirely devoted to vision and the theory of how light on the retina becomes a mental image, and how that mental image is then in turn put on the canvas. Saravana Deivasegamanis however does not stretch a canvas, but welds a sheet of metal onto a three-dimensional structure that serves as his base.

I do not want to stretch this parallel here, but it appears to be helpful in understanding the process better, because there are other interesting references here. Saravana Deivasegamani's art comes from meditation and is opposed to empirical science. The sculptures, however, are additive, as is the pointillism. Saravana Deivasegamani took a long time to get the color of the metallic surface right. He tried different metals, acids, and techniques until the result was right. The objects are not painted over or alloyed. He is a purist, proud of his technique. This is also something you often see on the streets here in India. People mastering their simple tools at leaves that leave one amazed. Saravana Deivasegamani pushes this to perfection. His practice is devotion, meditation. His art sprouts and grows, leaving one to wonder and open spaces of association.

The small series of 'Small Joys', 'Private Signs', 'Depth of Silence' reminds me of parts of the human body. The curves and openings, the organic shape of the iron, the surface that resembles a porous skin associate discourses of the abject, something that is neither subject nor object and therefore somewhat uncanny, irritating. When I asked Saravana Deivasegamani about this body association, he laughed heartily. Yes, he would have thought of a belly button too. 'See whatever you want' and his eyes sparkled.

Artist's bio

Saravana (b. Puducherry, 1984) is essentially a self-taught artist. He began his career as a metal craftsman and decorative grill designer. Over time, he honed his skills in fine art sculpting through self-study, experimentation, and vigorous practice.

His first major exhibition was held in 2016 at Gallery Square Circle, Kala Kendra (as part of a two-person show with eminent painter and fellow-Aurovilian Juergen Puetz). The same year, his sculptural installation titled 'Creators' made entirely of natural Palmyra seeds won the National Award of the Lalit Kala Akademi. His award-winning work was displayed at the 58th National Exhibition in the National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore. He was also invited to the national artists' conclave in February - March 2017.

Since then, Saravana has participated in a number of group exhibitions, artists' camps and workshops in Puducherry, Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi, and Hampi. He has also conducted lecture demonstrations on how to convert scrap/found material into evocative art objects

This article is also availble at https://artservice.auroville.org/category/articles/

The New Indian Express. "Once part of Tamil Nadu's identity, Palmyra in need of saving". accessed January 12, 2023. https://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/chennai/2018/apr/22/once-part-of-tamil-nadus-identity-palmyra-in-need-of-saving-1804734.html.

Why do we need a biennial? I have often asked myself this question. I have been to many places with major international cultural events, i.e., before COVID-19, that was. During Lockdown, I co-organized an artist-in-residence program to think about what the implications, threats, and opportunities of COVID-19 are for cultural practitioners. Everything turned out quite differently than we had hoped, the great upheaval failed to materialize, and in a time marked by crises many are now simply trying to return to the status quo. Have we really used the trillions of Euros and Dollars so thoughtlessly and without reflection, only to maintain a system that urgently needs a change?

The concept of biennials or major cultural events was already discredited before COVID-19. They are dominated by the art market and influencer posing. An international chic and hipster community, old intellectual hardliners, head-shaking know-it-alls, and naive do-gooders met there to applaud a powerless self-promotion of artist-curators and gallerist-egos. Many seriously want to show that the world should become better, but with what example do they go ahead?

Kochi-Muziris Biennale

I was at the Kochi Biennale for the first time in 2016, and I already thought that something different was being done here-better-with the heart in the right place and a vision that was oriented towards making a concrete, real difference. There were children's art camps, public events where anyone could and did come, school children and their mothers came from the villages of Kerala, run-down barracks, warehouses, docks were opened so that art students from all parts of India could exhibit there, international artists were invited to see the locations before they conceived their side-specific installations. There were a large number of art educators, many projects were focused on ecology, social impact, critique of the ruling class. Little children, who use their school vacations to look at art, laughingly ask foreigners on the street where they come from, only to ask even more joyfully with great pride and enchanting charm if they like Kerala.

Fort Kochi is a melting pot of India, where spiritual, colonial, indigenous, national, political, cultural influences have converged for centuries. Kochi is an architectural jewel covered with Che Guevara graffiti and communist election posters. Goats and cows walk among the rickshaws, and everything smells of Kerala's spice garden. Fresh fish is sold on the beach, while container ships and military reconnaissance vessels pass in the background. It is a vibrant city.

The fifth edition 2022/23

The 2022 Biennale started with organizational chaos. This is not really surprising in India, but it does show the challenges that Covid left behind. Many buildings stood empty for four years, or were just used for storage, which further reduced the already fragile building technology infrastructure. An incendiary letter on e-flux from participating artists attests to the frustration. Organizing a major international event in India may not be an easy task in itself, but doing so after two years of pandemic is actually impossible. It is all the more surprising that after two weeks of catastrophically communicated delays, the miracle of the Kochi Biennale happened again. Some things are still under construction even three weeks after the official partial opening. But most of it is professionally installed-in warehouses and barracks. The power of many artworks shines through the chaos.

Some large video installations, such as commissioned work by CAMP's "Bombay Tilts Down (2021-2022)" from Mumbai at Aspinwall or Amar Kanwar's "Such a Morning (2017-19)" from Delhi at Anand Warehouse, have transformative power. CAMP uses CCTV Surveillance footage and mixes it with percussive chants about solidarity, oppression, and hope in Mumbai's poorest neighborhoods.

CAMP - SD 480p

In contrast, Kanwar's work is poetically quiet, a journey into darkness. A mathematics professor, perhaps going blind, prepares for the darkness. What a task for a visual artist - a preparation for a life without sight! This is not only about the existential questions of survival, but about the limits of art, how far does art reach beyond perception? The video installation is extended by an installation of miniprojectors, in which elements of the film are selected and captured in settings. Lined up next to each other, the film thus becomes a linear copresence that allows the visitor to walk around between the images. The visitor is in a place of reverberation, of memory, the images of the film are faded, transformed, surreal.

Amar Kanwar- SD 480p

A general trend is also intensifying here. More and more artists are using the medium of film. Projections and screens are everywhere. Magically disturbing is the installation of Jitish Kallat "Covering Letter" (2012), the work has been seen many times before, but in the south of India it unfolds a completely different power. Ghandi sent a letter to Hitler on July 23, 1939. It was addressed 'Dear friend'. Ghandi emphasized that Hitler was the only person who could prevent the brutality of this war. The letter is projected continuously by Jitish Kallat on a cloud of mist. A touch of history is felt.

Since we are dealing with time media, it is impossible to cope with all of this, and so there is a competition of screens and projection sizes. There are many works on political, ethnic and social conflicts to be seen. Every story would be worth to be retold here. But the narrative medium reaches its limits here. The visitor needs time, but she is rewarded with a variety of perspectives from the point of view of the oppressed. In the age of portable pocket screens, it is appropriate to rely on this medium because our viewing habits are changing, the static image and text without dramaturgical staging are lost in the battle for attention.

It is nice to see that the curator shows great diversity in hanging. Large rooms with picture areas completely without text panels are beneficial - these hang in the hallway of the administrative wing of Aspinwall. The biennial gives the works space, the walls never seem crowded. This invites one to linger.

Art for the mind

Yohei Imamura "tsurugi" (2022) is a highlight in technical mastery. Over two years, Imamura used a silkscreen technique to create a 3D model of a mountain by layering. A video explains the process. The reflective layers are almost as varied as the more than 1000 layers of paint that create the 3D model of the mountain. It starts with the topographic maps, which are themselves a layer of abstraction from reality. I think of Baudriallard's simulacrum, of postmodern concepts of mapping. Imamura traces each elevation plane in order to transfer it individually to a silkscreen plane. This meditative tracing is also a preparation for mountain climbing; knowledge of the terrain is essential for survival.

By reproducing the mountains in 3D through layering, we are reminded of geological processes. It would be interesting to know what are the geological stratifications of the mountain itself, is there any correlation? Probably not. The whole could be created on a 3D printer, but here the inner design principles would be radically different, algorithmic, vector-based, tech-scanned. Criticism of a wide variety of technical media is clearly implied here. And so we find ourselves confronted with an object that combines different levels of representation and abstraction, created through an innovative form of masterful screen printing. Technical reproduction, imagination, construction, the intertwining of space and plane, of creativity and precision meet here.

A radical increase of the conceptual can be found in the works of Iman Issa "Lexicon (2012-19)" questions the relation of language, image, and imagination. The starting point are art-historical descriptions of images that are not shown. Instead, from these textual descriptions, Issa isolates formal elements that can be seen as sculptures next to the descriptions. It is an intellectual game that seems a bit out of place. However, this kind of textual, Western, critical, perhaps based on postcolonialist discourse does not really resonate.

Biennale of the people

This Biennale of the people has a different accent: political, participatory, inviting. This becomes very clear and evident in the works of Marcos Avila-Ferero "Theory of the wild gees, notes on the workers gestures (2019)". Avila-Ferero asked retired Japanese workers to repeat their movements of the work processes in their professional life. We see workers moving air in human chains. The whole thing seems so absurd and senseless, so exposing and inhuman, that the whole exploitation of labor becomes immediately tangible. The technical tracing of the physical motion sequences illustrates how the rationalization of labor uses the human body as a tool. We see how, after decades of routine, the body adapts and deforms to the work processes. Over the duration of the exhibition, dancers will be invited to respond to these work processes. This is exciting to imagine.

The curatorial statement reads, "even the most solitary of journeys is not one of isolation, but drinks deeply from that common wellspring of collective knowledge and ideas." Nowhere is this more evident than in the works of the Student Biennial. You can feel the verve of young artists, the poetry that unfolds in the warehouses from the colonial era. The works of young artists "drink deeply from that common wellspring of collective knowledge and ideas," - they take a big gulp.

This again is not unusual, in fact not that remarkable, because art students all over the world do this. Except in Kochi they are represented at the Biennale, they are visible to an international audience, they are heard, their voice is amplified and sounds in a chorus, they are not alone, they represent a whole generation, the generation to which the future belongs and which is taken away from them by the egoism of the ideals of old white men.

The work of Nilofar Shaikh of VNSGU "Healing Map, Bench" is such an example. A bench, with murals in the background, invites the viewer to confront the issue of violations and to enter into dialogue with the environment.

Dheeraj Jadhav shares his way of seeing with his installation "Planting Conversation", which is strong and compelling.

Nabam Hem, Taba Yaniya and Ejum Riba invite us into the world of the Tani clan with their large installation "Tani Nyia Nyji Muj". It is moving and thought-provoking.

The community art project Bhumi has worked in lockdown with a community in Bangladesh. Local materials and traditions result in a round of figures that exemplify the heart of this biennial. It can be seen on the sidelines of the biennial at the TKM Warehouse.

I always try to spend a few days at a biennial, I find it important to interact with the environment. In Kochi, I drink my chai on the boardwalk and laugh heartily with the people from Kerala, even though we don't have a common linguistic language. The south of India is incredibly hospitable, warm, carried by a spirituality that perceives life in every counterpart. These encounters are the real energy of the Kochi Biennale, without them none of this would be possible here. And I am beginning to understand what it means to truly live differently. It is the nature and the culture, the people and the spirituality, the harmony of the world that can be heard here. It is a radical counter design to the over saturated affluent societies. In the curatorial statement we find: "The human need to think freely without proscription, in spite of, and sometimes because of repression, all point to the way we react to conflict. The only enemy is apathy. That has no name or face, and it lies entwined with its bedfellow-self-censorship."

It is the Biennale of the people.

Further reading:

A major show of the woks from Amitabh Sengupta is on display at Kalakendra Art Gallery, Bharat Nivas, Auroville. In cooperation with Sarala's Art Center 70 paintings predominantly from the last decade can be seen. For the opening of the exhibition on Dec 16^th 2022 the secretary of Auroville and the director of the Alliance Français lit the candle.

Amitabh Sengupta was born in Calcutta in 1941 and graduated from Govt. College of Arts & Crafts, Calcutta in 1963. From 1966 to 1969 he received a scholarship for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he was witnessing the 68 student revolts. From 1977 until 1981 he joined the University of Port Harcourt in Nigeria, where he became Head of Creative Arts. He exhibited in India, Nigeria, Europe, and USA and currently lives in Calcutta.

The works by Amitabh Sengupta show a vast spectrum of styles. It is impressive to see how much he engaged with western modernist tradition and yet maintained his roots in Indian traditions. We can see this in the colors, the traces of written words, the iconography. Going through the exhibition there are echoes of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer, Pierre Soulage, Jasper Jones, Paul Klee and many more.

I was wondering about that rich reference and the echoes of western modernity, and found the answer in Amitabh Sengupta's writings. In his 'Memoir of an Artist' from 2014 he makes several times a reference to Rabindranath Tagore, most people will be familiar with his name as the first Nobel Prize winner in India. At the end of the chapter 'Indian Contemporary Art - an alternative modernity' Amitabh Sengupta writes: "In the absence of social dialogue, art is facing another challenge. The priorities of art commerce and global marketing are imposing pressure to remain 'modern' as constant reference to global trends. This was predicted by many, for example, Tagore, expressed admiration about western cultures, at the same time warned against the risk of coercion, which they saw a built-in process in the system." Amitabh Sengupta being part of the Bengal Art school takes Tagore to heart.

Art historical narratives

We can recall Rabindranath's poem Namaskar to Sri Aurobindo published in 1907 as it is well known. Rabindranath admired Sri Aurobindo's fight against colonialism and oppression and supported him during his time in prison. Aurobindo's book Renaissance in India with articles from 1918-21 comes to mind. But while the western eye can learn from Aurobindo how to see Indian Art through the Indian perspective, Rabindranath warns of the power of modernism in the visual arts for Indian Artist.

Here lay the roots of the negotiation between western modernist and Indian culture in the 20th century^th century. We see why the big show of Amitabh Sengupta fits into the Kalakendra Art Gallery, Bharat Nivas, Auroville. His work is informed by these discussions and addresses the struggles which western academic art historian theories have with not western art. Sengupta's oeuvre speaks to the difficulties Indian artists faced during the middle of the 20th century^th century to be seen internationally.

In 2021 Sengupta's "The History of Modernism in India" was published, a 200 pages thick book that celebrates diversity in India and warns of the misconception by the west of a "uniform and monolithic Hindu structure". Chapter 6 deals with Rabindranath Tagore's Dialectics of Art. How should the art of a young nation like India, that also has one of the oldest cultural histories in the world, respond to the dominating western modern concepts? We know that western modernism drew inspiration from its colonial exploitation of the other parts of the world (the prominent examples are Van Gogh, Picasso and Gaugin). That mistake may not be repeated by artists in countries that gained independence through painful paths.

Fluid mixtures

On Dec 20 2022 there was an artist talk planned. Art historian Dr. Ashrafi Bhagat gave an introduction lecture on the relevance of Amitabh Sengupta for the defining decades of the 1960ies in India. Artists had to find their voice, while connecting to the dominant western discourse, maintaining, and developing their own style. It was difficult, as there was criticism from all sides, either it was too western or not western enough, too traditional or not traditional enough, too subjective or not expressive enough... Amitabh Sengupta was an extraordinary productive artist, who masters many techniques like painting, drawing, printing, writing on the highest level. He is rooted in Indian history and its visual language and creates pictorial spaces that contain cultural memories, realistic spacial representation on an abstract plane, juxtaposed with remanences of signs and geometrical forms.

Ashrafi Bhagat-on-Amitabh SenGupta

Walking through the exhibition, one sees that the pictorial spaces in his series called 'Pyramids' or 'Inscription' are abstract composition with semiotic echoes, that activates an inner space that is associated with the path of mediation since the Vedic texts. Amitabh Sengupta's art is not explicitly spiritual, but it becomes sensible that the inner experience, the conscious mind, the creative expression, and the pictorial representation are interlinked within his body of work. Amitabh Sengupta however does not shy away from commentary on global issues with his drawing relating to the Covid-19 crises or his paintings relating to topics of urbanization and globalization.

Amitabh Sengupta voice is strong and manifests an intermiscence, i.e. a mixture of sensations, styles, thoughts, signs, space and memory that reminds me of movement of thoughts in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and Sri Aurobindo's commentary on the Kena Upanishad. There that strange word of 'intermiscence' appears at a place that explains the creations of rhythms and forms.

For Deleuze art is thought in matter, it is also a territory in which we build our home - literally and metaphorically. The different material elements in Amitabh Sengupta's work, the planes of composition, the connection of signs, the yantras of geometrical shapes, the pictorial space and memory invite the viewer to explore his/her inner space, where one defines home. It doesn't matter from where you come, Amitabh Sengupta's work invites everyone on that journey. Whether this is some sort of 'post-post -ism' is not relevant. That is the power of art that dares to address existential questions.

Further readings:

The CADALfest took place in Adishakti from December 16 to 20, 2022. I hadn't planned to go, but I was very surprised by the four days of round-table discussions, poetry and film screenings, concerts and theater performances by a fascinating Group by artists, activists and academics. I picked out a few things and went to the "Adivasi Round Table discussion with Vandna Tete, Ganga Sahay Meena, Seral Murmu & Ashwini Kumar Pankaj, moderated by Gopika Jadeja" followed by the "Thudumbu Percussions Performance by Unique Folk Son" on Saturday.

Above all, what I would call a 'performance lecture' by Ashwini Kumar Pankaj was energizing, evocative, charming and critical. He spoke in a mix of Hindi and English about the Adavasi cultures and their language and narratives. Ashwini Kumar Pankaj emphasized that the Adavasi have no expressions of violence or villains and therefore it is difficult to write in this language the popular narrative formats that revolve around crime stories and violent excesses. The Adivasi culture is not only different historically and culturally, as it lives in harmony with nature and collectively, but also in its languages:

Ashwini Kumar Pankaj_20221219

The Thudumbu Percussions performance of Unique Folk Song is, if I have understood correctly, in the tradition of Thudumbu drummers from Kerala, which tie in with temple rites.

Thudumbu Percussions Performance by Unique Folk Son

Then on Monday I saw Abhimanyu, or Chakra Vyugamstreet theater play in the tradition of Therukootu. This type of temple/street theater is typical of temple festivals in Tamil Nadu. The performers sing, dance, play music, it is a complex tradition of dramatic storytelling. For me, it has qualities of an opera. The group here has worked with Cirque du Soleil, among others. It was an impressive performance.

CADALfest

THERUKOOTHU

And finally, a small excerpt from a performance by Tenam.

„Tenma is an Artist, Composer and Curator based out of Chennai, India. With an educational background in visual communication and music production, he is invested in the uplifting and development of artists from the lower cadres of society. He has co-founded two iconic bands that revolutionized the music scene - The Casteless Collective with film director Pa. Ranjith, and the Tamil rock band, Kurangan. Simultaneously, he built two important platforms for indie artists - the Madras Indie Collective and Madras Medai. His recently released film Natchathiram Nagargiradu was critically acclaimed for its unique sound design as well as the brilliant use of the theatrical idiom." https://dalitadivasitext.wordpress.com/adishakti-participants/

Tenma-at-CADALfest

RoundGogu Shyamala, Salma, and Meena Kandasamy, moderated by Nicole Thiara, Ritu Tyagi, and Chandra Sekhar.

Gilles Grimaître visits Auroville for a few days during his Pro Helvetia artist residency in Bengaluru, Chennai and Pondicherry to engage with Carnatic music. The program he chose for the evening from Dec. 17^th, 2022, was a passionate, loving introduction to usually not so accessible Western avant-garde music.

Grimaître started off with Johannes Brahms - Drei Intermezzi op 117, some romantic crowd pleaser, followed by a more challenging piece by Olli Mustonen (*1967) called 'Jehkin Iivana'. Nobody would know the composers he selected after Brahms for the evening unless you are a very dedicated avant-garde music enthusiast, he said. But he wanted to show that avant-garde music can be fun and playful. We all smiled and laughed, when he played Daniel Moreira (*1984) - Rhythmic Study no 4 ("Ludvan ven Beethowig"). Moreira plays with Beethoven's 'Für Elise', which almost everyone who likes piano music knows. He cuts and samples, loops and collages pieces in such a light and playful way, that we lose all fear of contemporary music.

Gilles Grimaître plays Daniel Moreira Rhythmic Study no 4 (Ludvan ven Beethowig)

I recognized Moreira's teacher, Marco Stroppa, as a friend of mine also was a student of him. His students are funny, serious, eloquent. Gilles Grimaître played with astonishing lightness, joy and precision.

The next piece was by Beat Furrer (*1954) - 'Voicelessness. The snow has no voice'. Grimaître laughed when he said that he chose that piece as a Christmas tune for Auroville. Snow around Christmas may be a rare event here and should trouble us deeply if it ever happens. The piece is sincere, concentrated, I saw the snowflakes dancing, losing any sense of time, there was no beginning nor end, no dramatic structure or storytelling, just meditative, minimalistic concentration.

Gilles Grimaître plays Beat Furrer Voicelessness The snow has no voice

After the piece, it took Grimaître an eternity of stage seconds to come back into the room. The intensity of concentration was palpable. The last piece was special, it was written by a composer from Ukraine, and we might guess why that fits into the year 2022. It was written many years ago by Valentin Silvestrov (*1937) called 'Davos Lake', for the Davos festival. There was a concept to play piano concerts one on one. The piano player would play for 5 minutes for one person in a small room. I thought that this is pure capitalism. But when I heard the music - so tender and heartfelt, intimate, and loving - I saw it as a guerilla tactic, to melt the hearts of the listener and create an intimate connection between performer and audience. This concept came up during Corona again, i.e. at the Kammerorchester in Stuttgart.

The encore was Frank Zappa's 'The Black page' the avant-garde rock star, with classical training and the enfant terrible of the hybrid music world that blurs genre boundaries and doesn't care about high and low brow culture.

Thank you for a beautiful, joyful, memorable evening at the end of the year, that was globally so troubling.

-

Organic:

Gilles Grimaître was born in Geneva in 1988 studied improvisation and took an avid interest in composition and contemporary music. He entered the Hochschule der Künste Bern where he continued his musical training with Prof. Pierre Sublet. He also studied the organ with Pascale Van Coppenolle and composition with Xavier Dayer. As a soloist and chamber musician, Gilles Grimaître performs regularly in Europe. He often plays with Ensemble Contrechamps, Collegium Novum Zürich, Ensemble Proton and Ensemble Modern. He specializes in the accompaniment with vocalists, working often as an opera accompanist. He is also an active improviser and plays in the experimental band [bleu]. Gilles Grimaître won the first prize at the 2013 Nicati competition for contemporary music and received scholarships from the Marescotti Foundation, the Irène Dénéréaz Foundation and the Gabriele De Agostini Foundation. He was scholarship holder at the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt/Main for the academic year 2013-2014.

https://www.ensemblelemniscate.com/gilles-grimaitre

Article: Conceptual art during the Covid lockdown by Artist Aabhas Mahindre

"the eye thinks even more than it listens" (Deleuze)

I now remember that before I started reading Deleuze, I had been working on process aesthetics. I made a 100-page manuscript, with notes, quotations, structural sketches. I wanted to get away from the idea that art consists of objects that are perceived in a particular way, because this gives rise to two essential strands of thought: 1) what constitutes an object that we call art, and 2) why is the perception of art different from everyday perception? There are countless theories on both strands, some combine them, some opt for one, others for the other.

But somehow I was always suspicious of this: the relation Art object perceiving subject. There is this dualism again, which some have tried to radically resolve by choosing one of the two sides of this relationship at the expense of the other. A dispute between idealism, materialism and empiricism. Philosophy, it seemed to me, had become quite bogged down. The field of philosophical aesthetics is not wrongly considered unmanageable, sometimes soft and inconsistent, something for philosophers who enjoy the adventure of thinking more than the search for truth. And that's what it's all about, the pleasure.

Art

I have found a way to do this without having to abandon aesthetic thinking. It seemed to me that the only way to counter this dualism was a different ontology. An ontology of process. I read H. Bergson and N. Whitehead and searched the art world for works of art that addressed this. Works of art that had time as their medium suggested themselves: Film and interactive installations. It seemed to me that an essential aspect of this art was the transition from one state to another, from one image to the next ("Film is the truth - 24 times a second", Godard).

Or between letters. Here I found Paul de Marinis Messenger (1998) and contrasted this with Nancy Holt & Richard Serra's "Boomerang" (1974). Both are works that stretch language to such an extent that the spaces between the letters and words become perceptible. A deeper reflection then showed me that these spaces are actually just as meaningless as the letters and words themselves. Meaning, sense, statement, beauty, reflection of - what exactly? They point to the process of thinking and communication itself. For me, this was the approach to art that is not based on any kind of representation. Because here, too, in this fatal concept of representation is the fall from grace of dualism.

"This is the dark thought I have had about representation for so long: we are immersed in it and it has become inseparable from our condition. It has created a world, a cosmos even, of false problems such that we have lost our true freedom: that of invention." (Dorothea Olkowski, p.91)

It was this sentence that suddenly opened the door to a different way of thinking for me. I wanted to go back to the origin, the origin of language and expression, not as something strictly defined, but as an act of creation.

Process aesthetics

This creative act is a process that always remains a process, it does not produce an object or subject, but a never-ending process. Creating art, receiving art, documenting and preserving art are all just phases of a process within which what we call art manifests itself in different ways. There is no art, only an aesthetic process, the reflection on which I call process aesthetics. As I mentioned above, I had gotten myself quite tangled up.

In essence, however, I hold on to the direction of thought, and found a kind of echo in the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze:

"Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter." Gilles Deleuze - Difference and repetition p. 139

This encounter, what is it? On an everyday level, we are familiar with it when a work of art somehow speaks to us, whatever that may mean.

I think that thinking about process aesthetics and Deleuze's adventure have now led me to the Upanishads. Here, in a cyclical and interacting thinking, the self encounters myself. It is perhaps also precisely the tautology that is at the heart of idealistic theories of self-consciousness such as Hegel's.

The whole thing is a process that has no essential meaning at any time, it stands for nothing, it represents nothing, it merely exists in order to experience itself.

Om Namah Shivaya

Olkowski, Dorothea. Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

I've been reading in India for three weeks now: Deleuze, Upanishads, Sri Aurobindo. Sometimes I meditate in between. The rest is still a remnant of everyday life in the New World. Reading the news, consuming entertainment media, organizing things that don't really have any meaning here, but need continuity so that they don't break down in old Europe and the New World.

So reading... It seems to me that I have been preparing myself to read here for decades. My thinking oscillates between Deleuze and the Upanishads. This wisdom in India, that everything is one, and the whole universe exists only because the self wants to know itself, is so incredibly strong that I still only guess how deep this thought is. Schopenhauer's title 'The World as Will and Representation' starts to make sense, Deleuze reference to Spinoza as a spiritual thinker of immanence also makes sense. I don't yet dare to read Deleuze's book on immanence again. Instead, 1000 Plateaus... This book, which is not a book at all, but a machine, a thinking machine (Professor Dr. Dr. Dr. Augustus van Dusenalso The thinking machine sends its regards)...

I have designed seminars with the book without ever really understanding it. In fact, it's hardly even readable. It's more of an instrument. An attempt to think about the world in a fundamentally different way. Conventional capitalist, dualistic, categorical thinking is challenged on every page. I have always wondered how Deleuze and Guattari arrived at such a level of consciousness. How did they manage to move so far away from the prevailing ideology that they seem like prophets of a more inclusive way of thinking? I wanted to find out together with my students. We failed, of course, but we were fine, and we saw the world differently afterwards, and that's what a university is all about, isn't it?

Deterritorialization

But now the worlds of thought connect. The biological references, the central position of art (which is much more exciting with animals than with humans), thinking in immanence, the flying lines, territories and abstract machines. For me, all of this can really only be understood from the Upanishads. And today I found a quote that I would like to share. It's about deterritorialization. A complicated term that builds on many other complicated terms. But the basic idea seems to me to be that the world is made up of its elements. These are first formed in strata/layers (e.g. geological layers). Within these layers, the elements resonate with each other, they form a rhythm and thus create a milieu. This can be visualized quite vividly in the animal kingdom, e.g. birdsong, there are refrains and rites... This milieu creates a territory, a home. The self in this territory, where it is at home, is shaped by the layers, milieus, rhythms etc... and creates a home through the creation of art, for example. It expresses itself, creates signs and symbols, it becomes semiotic and enters the realm of art (this can be the pattern of a butterfly, the house construction of a Bowerbirda house. Within this territory there are then movements, including movements of thought, that lead out of it. Life, thoughts, the earth deterritorialize them. So now the quote in a DeepL translation of the English original (D stands for the function of deterritorialization):

"This is already evident in the mystery of "birth", in which the earth as a glowing, eccentric or intense focus lies outside the territory and exists only in the movement of D. Even more, the earth, the glacial land, is deterritorialization par excellence: therefore it belongs to the cosmos and presents itself as the material through which humans tap into cosmic forces. One could say that the earth as deterritorialization is itself the strict correlate of D. This goes so far that D can be described as the creator of the earth - a new land, a universe, not just a reterritorialization.

This is the meaning of "absolute". The absolute does not express anything transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a magnitude that would transcend all given (relative) magnitudes. It only expresses a kind of movement that is qualitatively different from relative movement."

I will spend the next few months trying to understand what that really means.

Here is the original:

"This can already be seen in the mystery of the "natal," in which the earth as ardent, eccentric, or intense focal point is outside the territory and exists only in the movement of D. More than that, the earth, the glacial, is Deterritorialization par excellence: that is why it belongs to the Cosmos, and presents itself as the material through which human beings tap cosmic forces. We could say that the earth, as deterritorialized, is itself the strict correlate of D. To the point that D can be called the creator of the earth-of a new land, a universe, not just a reterritorialization.

This is the meaning of "absolute." The absolute expresses nothing transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a quantity that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses only a type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement." Deleuze 1000 Plateaus p. 509

Highways have always been special places for me. Most of the time I wasn't under time pressure, I rarely had to get from A to B in a certain time. Rather, highways are travel routes. I find myself there in intermediate states, a kind of no man's land with an infinite number of possibilities. That opens up thinking spaces. They are often simply empty. The brain is busy moving safely in traffic. It's a pleasant way to keep busy, the mind is busy and alert, a mistake would be fatal. If I am understretched or tired, I drive a little faster or slower, or take a break. This creates a kind of equilibrium.

In this equilibrium, other thoughts can sort themselves out and spin away unnoticed. Only occasionally does my consciousness hold on to a thought. This allows thoughts to find their way without immediately encountering the usual thought filters. I always get to know myself a little anew on the highway, or remember a former self.

Then there is the physical space. This is either familiar and therefore triggers associations that are triggered from outside, so to speak. Or it is a new space that invites you to dream and arouses curiosity. Personally, I always find this positive. I don't really experience any fear or unpleasant feelings on the highway, although I do sometimes think about unpleasant things, that's for sure.

This space of movement, travel, association, gentle stimulation and alertness almost always makes me think about my childhood at some point. After all, I grew up in a country where people drive a lot. It would be nice if that changed soon, and I'm trying to drive less myself. It's no longer in keeping with the times, and it's actually a bit irresponsible.

So this space is a given space. It is not creative or free. It is a space with strong conditions. I like to immerse myself in this space to see what other spaces I actually want to free myself from. It's probably the case for many people that we dwell on our thoughts while driving and want to change our lives in some way.

I like being on the highway. Traveling on the highway is a metaphorical place, a physically metaphorical place - a physical metaphor. I used to think a lot about theories of linguistic metaphors. What do they mean, what is their linguistic reference, how do they work... especially in art and literature. Metaphors are words that mean something different in a certain context than they normally mean. That is exciting!

Traveling on the highway is the opposite of a simulation, and yet these spaces function similarly: simulation spaces and travel routes. Both spaces mean something that they are not actually.

Life is so complex and there are so many different ways of living. There is no right or wrong way to live. Life is a gift.

But what do you say about the negative energies, the destruction and aggression, the greed and resentment? That's all part of it. There is only acceptance. But acceptance does not mean approving of everything, nor does it mean tolerating everything. If a community decides to establish rules and sanction the violation of these rules, then this is also a form of acceptance. As humanity, we signed the Charter of Human Rights with the United Nations in 1945. A lot follows from this, above all how we should treat each other, what is ok and what is not. Acceptance does not mean that we should not and cannot try to change the world.

The excluded

In recent generations, so many discriminated minorities have fought for their rights because they have either violated the norms or been exploited, or both. This discrimination is, of course, the exact opposite of acceptance.

But when a person decides to change their life and leave the so-called status quo. Then the status quo society speaks of a dropout. But isn't it much more the case that people who have decided not to change the status quo have dropped out of life? They remain in a state of rigidity. We probably somehow need traditions, rituals, structures and rules in order to function as a community. And part of these structures may be that they cannot be changed arbitrarily and individually.

There is a relationship here. People who are excluded from mainstream society and people who want to leave it. Why are some not allowed or do not want to participate in this discourse in a society? Is this merely a question of the normal distribution curve (Gauss), or are there structural blind spots in the majority society?

Decay and preservation

History shows that there have been many societies that have fallen, some of which were defeated by enemies or destroyed by natural disasters, but some of which also fell due to decadence, internal conflicts or bad decisions. Above all, however, it shows that there are an infinite number of different forms of society and that value systems can change radically.

Most societies have functions of priests, philosophers, artists, shamans, intellectuals etc. who have a special position. They are not involved in the distribution of tasks in everyday life, the production processes and distribution mechanisms and have a reflective function. They keep the archives, develop new ideas, offer interpretations in conflicts. Ideally, they are the protectors of wisdom, of knowledge treasures. They are involved in a different time, have access to a different consciousness. They see the before and after of societies. They are therefore essential, revered and feared at the same time.

Radicals

These special positions that they occupy are free spaces in a society. New rules of the game are tested here. These playgrounds are subject to special protection. Changing their places is vehemently defended by society. Not everyone is allowed to play along. And if someone 'drops out'? Then he or she is also saying that this system of free spaces no longer works. The most sacred place in society is being called into question. This is also vehemently defended.

And the dropout? Has she not tried hard enough and just not found the right place within society? Did she just give up too soon? Maybe she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and would have found her place in another life. Or maybe not. Maybe there is simply no place for her in the current society. Maybe there are these blind spots.

Hermits, autonomous communities, monasteries and gurus mark positions in the world that elude current societies. They cannot be assimilated. In this respect, they are radical. (I am talking here about peaceful positions and not revolutionary positions). These peaceful positions occupy a satellite position.

They have a luminous power and show the cosmonauts the way.

I love complexity, but sometimes I also love radical simplification - to get some clarity. For example, the history of ideas in the visual arts. In Europe, after the great migration of peoples, the history of art can be sketched as the history of ideas in a woodcut:

• In medieval art, stories were told visually - mainly the stories of the Bible. Most people could not read, let alone Latin or Greek. The wood panel painting of the altars is therefore a kind of comic, and just as free in the spatial order, perspective and relationship of the objects.
• In the Renaissance, construction principles of the mind were applied: Central perspective, color theory, visual effects such as sfumato, etc... The point was to show that artists could construct an illusion.
• In the Baroque era, the space was contained. The church space was folded, the senses stimulated, the painting seduced, the (art) objects stood for themselves.
• In the Rococo period, the nobility was amused. Sometimes very poor taste and interior design served as a spectacle - courtly, decadent.
• Classicism was an ethical correction. The classical values and principles of antiquity were revived.
• Realism was now, for the first time, really about artistically capturing the world as we think it is. Pretty and ugly, banal and uplifting...
• In Impressionism, then, the philosophical reflection on our own perceptual apparatus. After all, we can only depict what we perceive. The reality beyond our senses eludes representation.
• Abstraction, which is not really an abstraction at all, is about inner forms of the mind.
• ...

A list of such radical simplifications could be made as long as you like. But it is nice to see that there is a dialectical movement here. Something new is tried out until it is recognized that a limit has been reached. The design principles are reversed. This is progress, we say. The 'European elite' is getting 'better'. There may be something to this history of ideas, but what is visible here? What cannot be formulated at certain times and why? Are Delacroix's drawings not pure Impressionism? Is Grünewald's portraiture not pure realism? And is the formal language of medieval art not pure, concrete art?

Art theories

Who told this story? Vasari, Gombrich, Panofsky? Why was it told this way? And who had previously collected and sorted it out in the cabinets of curiosities, the private collections of lords of castles and priests in church halls? And what was burned during the revolutions that we never saw again afterwards?

I have always had a philosophical interest in the media of art. I rarely looked at artists' biographies. I always found the philosophical art criticism of Roland Barthes, for example, more exciting, or the philosophical theory of Danto, Deleuze or Foucault. Here, too, a long list could be compiled; here, too, it is not about the individual details. The perspective is important. Art is created in the viewer. For me, art has always been not only an aesthetic experience but also mental work. That has now changed for me.

The history of progress or reflection, of expertise and contextualization, philosophical media analysis and any kind of value creation, ideological superstructure and power structure are increasingly losing my interest. Art is dead, long live art. This was a popular motto not only in the avant-garde era. It expresses how a society deals with art. It is an object, a very interesting object, but an object. The spiritual in art, as Kandinsky, for example, saw it, is lost in the history of ideas. The museums as secular temples of art and the galleries as capitalist, ideological amplifiers drive the spiritual out of art. If art lies in the viewer, then it is everywhere, but least of all in museums, galleries, churches and collections.

Expectations

But perhaps my expectations are simply too high. I learned that art is the highest good in our culture. It is where human experience, knowledge and education, perfection, pleasure and reflection come together. Art is the highest art. It deserves respect, it is inspiration, perfect in genius and incomprehensible to ordinary people.

Perhaps we should take art off this pedestal again and let it lose itself in arbitrariness as a craft. But perhaps we should also expose art for what it is, always a lie. After all, I can't eat a painted apple. But for me, art is one thing above all: an object of meditation. Art is concentration and openness. Art demands interpretation through contemplation. Only then is it alive. I can find it everywhere, including in museums, galleries, churches and collections.

When I came back 'home' from India for the first time, I looked at my library and saw that almost nothing in it interested me anymore. What had happened? What is in this library and what is not?

My library is that of a philosopher and art historian who has taught in Europe and the USA. It contains many books that deal with the discourses of modernism and postmodernism - theoretically, historically, analytically, comparatively... Many of them deal with the topic of representation. What is depicted, for what purpose and in what context?

But in this structure of representation lies a fundamental misunderstanding, an evil. It is what Plato calls a lie. I can't eat the painted apple. The still life serves reflection. However, what I take as the object of reflection is an image, a representation, and stands for something else that is 'truer'. So why, I ask myself, concern myself with representation?

Buddha

This question came to a head for me when I read Sri Aurobindo. For him, art is essentially devotion (bhakti):

"Not only the face, the eyes, the pose but the whole body and every curve and every detail aid in the effect and seem to be concentrated into the essence of absolute adoration, submission, ecstasy, love tenderness which is the Indian ideal of bhakti. These are not figures of devotees. But of the very personality of devotion. [...] Yet while the Indian mind is sized and penetrated to the very roots of its living and embodied ecstasy, it is quite possible that the Occidental, not trained in the same spiritual culture, would miss entirely the meaning of the image and might only see a man praying." (Sri Aurobindo on Indian Art)

Plato's caveman left the movie theater when he/she was freed by the philosopher. She turned around and left. My library is now in a place where I no longer live.